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 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems, as well as the Limbo programming language. Software engineering (SE) is the profession concerned with specifying, designing, developing and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, and other fields. ... An author is the person who creates a written work, such as a book, story, article or the like. ... Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) was the main research and development arm of the United States Bell System. ... Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Inferno is an operating system for creating and supporting distributed services. ... Limbo is a programming language for writing distributed systems and is the language used to write applications for the Inferno operating system. ...

He also worked on the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. In computing, the Blit was a programmable bitmap graphics terminal designed by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi of Bell Labs in 1983. ...

Over the years he has written many text editors, Sam and Acme are the most well known and still in active use and development. Sam is a multi-file text editor originally designed at Bell Labs by Rob Pike (with the help of Ken Thompson and other Unix developers) in the early 1980s for the DMD 5620 windowing terminal running Unix. ... A screenshot of Acme Acme is a text editor and shell from the Plan 9 operating system, designed and implemented by Rob Pike. ...

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. Brian Wilson Kernighan (pronounced Ker-ni-han; the g is silent; born 1942) is a computer scientist who worked at the Bell Labs and contributed to the design of the pioneering AWK and AMPL programming languages. ... The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, is a 1999 book about computer programming and software engineering, published by Addison-Wesley. ... Written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, both of Bell Labs, it is the first ever book on the Unix operating system. ... Ken Thompson Kenneth Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is a pioneer of computer science notable for his contributions to the development of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system. ... UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... Vismon was the Bell Labs system which put authors faces on one of their internal email system. ...

Pike also appeared once on The Late Show with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn and Teller. Late Show with David Letterman is an hour-long weeknight comedy and talk show broadcast by CBS from the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway in New York City. ... Penn (left) & Teller Penn and Teller are a two-man magic and comedy team, comprised of Penn Jillette and Teller. ...

As a joke Pike claimed to have won the 1980 Olympic silver medal in Archery; however, Canada boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics. Archery at the 1980 Summer Olympics was held at the archery range, located at the Trade Unions Olympic Sports Centre (Krylatskoye district, Moscow). ...

Pike, a Canadian citizen, currently works for Google. Citizenship is membership in a political community (originally a city but now usually a state) and carries with it rights to political participation; a person having such membership is a citizen. ... Google Inc. ...

Quotes

• "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." - circa 1991 [1]
• "Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing." - [2]
• "There's no such thing as a simple cache bug." [3]
• "Caches aren't architecture, they're just optimization." [4]
• "Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces." [5]
• "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks." - on the X Window System [6]
• "Unix never says `please.'" [7]
• "Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."[8] - on one tool for one job
• "I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."[9]

KDE 3. ...

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)

To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Acme is a multiwindow editor and shell under the Plan 9 operating system. ... The plumber, in the Plan 9 operating system, is a mechanism for interprocess communication, somewhat similar to copy and paste. ... Sam is a multi-file text editor originally designed at Bell Labs by Rob Pike (with the help of Ken Thompson and other Unix developers) in the early 1980s for the DMD 5620 windowing terminal running Unix. ... Mark V Shaney is a fake Usenet user whose postings were generated by using Markov chain techniques. ... Written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, both of Bell Labs, it is the first ever book on the Unix operating system. ... 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Brian Wilson Kernighan (pronounced Ker-ni-han; the g is silent; born 1942) is a computer scientist who worked at the Bell Labs and contributed to the design of the pioneering AWK and AMPL programming languages. ...

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.
• Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
• Pike's personal homepage
• Pike's Google homepage
• Questions and Answers with Rob Pike - by Robin "Roblimo" Miller (published in Slashdot in October 2004)
• Google Recruits Mature Minds to Join Brainiac Kids - Article by Kevin Coughlin (published in Newhouse News Service in 2005)