Rob Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer known for his contributions to operating systems, programming languages, and text encoding. His work at Bell Labs and Google has influenced how we build and think about software systems.
Bell Labs Era
Pike joined Bell Labs in 1980, working with Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and other Unix pioneers. He contributed to Unix development and co-created Plan 9, an experimental operating system exploring distributed computing.
Creating UTF-8
In 1992, Pike and Thompson designed UTF-8 encoding during dinner at a diner. Their elegant design—backward-compatible with ASCII while supporting all Unicode characters—became the universal standard for text encoding on the web.
Books and Programming
Pike co-authored influential programming books:
- “The Unix Programming Environment” with Brian Kernighan
- “The Practice of Programming” with Kernighan
- “The Go Programming Language” with Alan Donovan
Go at Google
At Google, Pike worked with Thompson and Robert Griesemer to create Go. Frustrated with C++‘s complexity and slow compile times, they designed Go for simplicity, fast compilation, and effective concurrency.
Philosophy
Pike advocates for simplicity in software design. His essays and talks emphasize that clarity beats cleverness, and that less is often more in programming language and systems design.