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^[1][2] and the Plan 9 operating system while working at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team.^[1]

Pike wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981.^{[3][non-primary source needed]} He is the sole inventor named in the US patent for overlapping windows on a computer display.^[4]

With Brian Kernighan, he is the co-author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment.^[1] With Ken Thompson, he is the co-creator of UTF-8.^[1]

While at Bell Labs, Pike was also involved in the creation of the Blit graphical terminal for Unix,^[5] the Inferno operating system, and the Limbo programming language.^[1] Pike also developed lesser systems such as the vismon program for displaying faces of email authors.^{[citation needed]}

Over the years, Pike has written many text editors; sam^[6] and acme are the most well known and are still in active use and development.^{[citation needed]}

Pike started working at Google in 2002.^[1] While there, he was also involved in the creation of the programming language Sawzall.^[7]

Pike appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn & Teller.^{[3][non-primary source needed]}

Pike is married to author and illustrator Renée French; the couple live both in the US and Australia.^[8]

• The plumber – the interprocess communications mechanism used in Plan 9 and Inferno
• Mark V. Shaney – an artificial Usenet poster designed by Pike