Rob Pike
Principal Engineer

Rob Pike is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, Inc. He works on distributed systems, data mining, programming languages, and software development tools. Before Google, Rob was a member of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that developed Unix. While there, he worked on computer graphics, user interfaces, languages, concurrent programming, and distributed systems. He was an architect of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and is the co-author with Brian Kernighan of The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. More recently he was a co-designer of the Go programming language. Other details of his life appear on line but vary in veracity.

Publications:

• LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products[PDF]
  lanl.arXiv.org > astro-ph (2008).
  Z. Ivezic, J.A. Tyson, R. Allsman, J. Andrew, R. Angel, et al, for the LSST Collaboration

• Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall [PDF]
  Scientific Programming Journal
  Special Issue on Grids and Worldwide Computing Programming Models and Infrastructure
  13:4, pp. 227-298.
  Rob Pike, Sean Dorward, Robert Griesemer, Sean Quinlan
  Abstract

• Classical rules and quantum games
  Phys. Rev. A 66, 024306 (2002).
  S.J. van Enk and R. Pike

• Security in Plan 9 [HTML]
  Proceedings of the 2002 USENIX Technical Conference, San Francisco, 2002.
  Russ Cox, Eric Grosse, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Sean Quinlan

• Plumbing and Other Utilities [PDF]
  Proceedings of the 2000 USENIX Technical Conference, pp. 159--170, San Diego, 2000.

• Lexical File Names in Plan 9 or Getting Dot-Dot Right [HTML, PDF]
  Proceedings of the 2000 USENIX Technical Conference, pp. 85--92, San Diego, 2000.

• The Practice of Programming [HTML]
  Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, 1999.
  Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike

• Inferno
  Proceedings of the IEEE Compcon 97 Conference, pp. 241--244, San Jose, 1997.
  Sean Dorward, Rob Pike, David Leo Presotto, Dennis Ritchie, Howard Trickey, and Phil Winterbottom

• Plan 9 from Bell Labs [PDF]
  Computing Systems, Vol. 8, 3, pp. 221--254, Summer 1995.
  Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Sean Dorward, Bob Flandrena, Ken Thompson, Howard Trickey, and Phil Winterbottom

• Plan 9 Programmer's Manual [HTML]
  Ed. Rob Pike, Bell Laboratories Murray Hill NJ, 1995, (2 Volumes. Republished by Harcourt Brace Co. Orlando FL 1995) .

• Acme: A User Interface for Programmers [PDF]
  Proceedings of the Winter 1994 USENIX Conference, pp. 223--234, San Francisco, 1994.

• Hello World or Καλημέρα κόσμε or こんにちは 世界 [PDF]
  Proceedings of the Winter 1993 USENIX Conference, pp. 43--50, San Diego, 1993.
  Rob Pike and Ken Thompson

• The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9 [PDF]
  Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGOPS Workshop, Mont Saint-Michel, 1992.
  Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Ken Thompson, Howard Trickey, and Phil Winterbottom

• 8½ the Plan 9 Window System [PDF]
  Proceedings of the Summer 1991 USENIX Conference, pp. 257--265, Nashville, 1991.

• Process Sleep and Wakeup on a Shared-memory Multiprocessor [PDF]
  Proceedings of the Spring 1991 EurOpen Conference, pp. 161--166, Tromso, 1991.
  Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Ken Thompson, and Gerard Holzmann

• Plan 9 from Bell Labs
  Proceedings of the Summer 1990 UKUUG Conference, pp. 1--9, London, 1990.
  Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Ken Thompson, and Howard Trickey

• The Implementation of Newsqueak [PostScript]
  Software - Practice and Experience, Vol. 20, 7, pp. 649--659, 1990.

• A Concurrent Window System [PostScript]
  Computing Systems, Vol. 2, 2, pp. 133--153.

• Window Systems Should Be Transparent [PostScript]
  Computing Systems, Vol. 1, 3, pp. 279--296, Summer 1988.

• The Text Editor sam [PDF]
  Software - Practice and Experience, Vol. 17, 11, pp. 813--845, 1987.

• Structural Regular Expressions
  Proceedings of the EUUG Spring 1987 Conference, pp. 21--28, Helsinki, 1987.

• On the Construction of Foamcore Telescope Parts
  Telescope Making, Vol. 28, pp. 10--15, Fall 1986.
  Rob Pike and Dave Hagelbarger

• Squeak: A Language for Communicating with Mice
  Computer Graphics, Vol. 19, 3, pp. 199--204, 1985.
  Luca Cardelli and Rob Pike

• The Hideous Name [PostScript]
  USENIX Summer 1985 Conference Proceedings, pp. 563, Portland Oregon, 1985.
  Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger

• Face the Nation
  USENIX Summer 1985 Conference Proceedings, pp. 81, Portland Oregon, 1985.
  Rob Pike and Dave Presotto,

• The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal
  Bell Labs Tech. J., Vol. 63, 8 part 2, pp. 1607--1631, 1984.

• Hardware Software Tradeoffs for Bitmap Graphics on the Blit [PostScript]
  Software - Practice and Experience, 1985.
  Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi and John Reiser

• The UNIX Programming Environment [HTML]
  Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1984.
  Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike

• Graphics in Overlapping Bitmap Layers
  Trans. on Graphics, Vol. 2, 2, pp. 135--160, (Reprinted in Proc. SIGGRAPH 1983 331-356) .

• Order Propagation Near the Percolation Threshold
  J. Phys. A, Vol. 14, L169, 1981.
  R. Pike and H. E. Stanley

• A White-Light Solar Telescope
  Sky and Telescope, Vol. 60, 3, pp. 245, 1980.

• Ludwig: An Example of Interactive Computer Graphics in a Score Editor
  Proc. of 3rd. Intl Computer Music Conference, Vol. 2, pp. 392--409, Dept. of Music Northwestern University, 1978.
  W. T. Reeves, W. Buxton, R. Pike, and R. Baecker

• A Bright Future for the Night Sky [HTML]
  Sky and Telescope, Vol. 55, 2, pp. 126, 1978.
  R. Pike and R. L. Berry

• Computer Animation of Astronomical Phenomena: The KEPLER System
  Computer Systems Research Group University of Toronto, 1977, Dynamic Graphics Project Technical Memorandum.

• The Size of the Newtonian Diagonal
  Sky and Telescope, Vol. 53, 3, pp. 220, 1977.
  W. T. Peters and R. Pike

• A Simple Computer Model for the Growth of Light Pollution [HTML]
  J. Roy. Soc. Can., Vol. 70, 3, pp. 116, 1976.

• White Light Observation of a Solar Flare
  J. Roy. Ast. Soc. Can., Vol. 68, pp. 330, 1974.