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 a 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.