Rob Pike

Pike at Guadec 2001 in Copenhagen, Denmark

Rob Pike is a Canadian software engineer and author.

Sourced

• "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." - circa 1991 [1]
• "Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing." [2]
• "There's no such thing as a simple cache bug." [3]
• "Caches aren't architecture, they're just optimization." [4]
• "Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces." [5]
• "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks."
  • On the X Window System
• "Unix never says 'please'." [6]
• "Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."
  • On one tool for one job
• "Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building."
  • on Sam (text editor)
• "I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy'"[7]