Rob Pike
Rob Pike (born 1956) is a software engineer and author. He is best known for his work at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems.
He also worked on the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981.
Over the years he has written many text editors, Sam and Acme are the most well known and still in active use and development.
Pike, with Brian Kernighan, is the co-author of The Practice of Programming and The UNIX Programming Environment. With Ken Thompson he is the co-creator of UTF-8. Pike also developed lesser systems such as the Vismon program for putting the faces of authors in internal email.
Pike also appeared once on The Late Show with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn and Teller.
It is often claimed that Pike won the 1980 Olympic silver medal in Archery; however, this is untrue.
Pike, a Canadian citizen, currently works for Google.
Quotes
- "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." - circa 1991
- "Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing."
- "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks." - on the X Window System
- "There's no such thing as a simple cache bug."
- "At MIT the server is the unit of invention."
- "Caches aren't architecture, they're just optimization."
See also
- The Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system.
- Acme: A User Interface for Programmers
- The Plumber
- The Sam text editor
- Mark V Shaney
- The Unix Programming Environment (1984 with Brian Kernighan)
External links
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy - Slides of his presentation at the commemoration of 1000000000 seconds of the Unix clock.