Rob Pike

http://herpolhode.com/rob/, http://research.google.com/people/r/

RobPike wrote the following mostly-serious but slightly tongue-in-cheek bio for his 1994 Usenix paper presentation on the PlanNine AcmeProgrammingEnvironment:

"RobPike, well known for his appearances on ``Late Night with David Letterman'', was also a Member of Technical Staff at BellLabs, where he has been since 1980, the same year he won the Olympic silver medal in Archery. In 1981 he wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has since written ten more. With BartLocanthi? he designed the Blit terminal; with BrianKernighan he wrote TheUnixProgrammingEnvironment. A shuttle mission nearly launched a gamma-ray telescope he designed. He is a Canadian citizen and has never written a program that uses cursor addressing."

I believe he did appear at least once on Letterman as assistant to Penn and Teller, but he's joking to say he's well-known for that. The comment about archery is also a joke of some sort; Pike is a Canadian citizen who has worked in the U.S. for decades, and both Canada and the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympics, so you needn't go looking for the records of that year's Olympics to figure this out.

The rest of his bio appears to be true.

He now (2004) works for GoogleInc.

Rob Pike's old but still (2005) extant homepage: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/rob/

Also co-authored with BrianKernighan ThePracticeOfProgramming.

He also wrote the influential papers:

• StructuralRegularExpressions, http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/
• "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/
• "Acme: A User Interface for Programmers", http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/
• "Graphics in overlapping bitmap layers", http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=800059.801165
• "Notes on Programming in C", http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/pikestyle

...and more.

And more links and info also at: http://genius.cat-v.org/rob-pike/

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