Textbook of Linux

b. 1956, Canada — Bell Labs; Google

Also known as: Pike

Rob Pike was at Bell Labs from 1980, working alongside Thompson, Ritchie, and Kernighan. He was a core designer of Plan 9 from Bell Labs — the successor to Unix that carried the "everything is a file" idea to its logical conclusion, treating the network, processes, windows, and devices as filesystems. Plan 9 never displaced Unix commercially but profoundly influenced later systems.

He co-authored The Unix Programming Environment with Brian Kernighan and The Practice of Programming with Kernighan — both canonical texts on writing clear, portable C. With Ken Thompson he designed UTF-8 in 1992 — in an evening, on the back of a restaurant placemat — now the dominant text encoding on the internet.

At Google since 2002, Pike co-created the Go programming language with Thompson and Robert Griesemer. Go's orientation — static typing, garbage collection, CSP-style goroutines, fast compilation, a strong standard library — reflects a lifetime of what did and didn't work in systems programming.