Rob Pike

Robert Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go programming language while working at Google and the Plan 9 operating system while working at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team.

Pike wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. He is the sole inventor named in the US patent for overlapping windows on a computer display.

With Brian Kernighan, he 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 character encoding.

Additional works
While at Bell Labs, Pike was also involved in the creation of the Blit graphical terminal for Unix, the Inferno operating system, and the Limbo programming language. Pike also developed lesser systems such as the Newsqueak concurrent programming language and the vismon program for displaying faces of email authors.

Over the years, Pike has written many text editors; sam and acme are the most well known.

Pike started working at Google in 2002. While there, he was also involved in the creation of the programming language Sawzall.

Pike appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn & Teller.

Personal life
Pike is married to author and illustrator Renée French; the couple live both in the US and Australia.