Rob Pike Quotes & Sayings

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C. — Rob Pike

There's no such thing as a simple cache bug. — Rob Pike

Why would you have a language that is not theoretically exciting? Because it's very useful. — Rob Pike

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic. — Rob Pike

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is — Rob Pike

Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination — Rob Pike

Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it's easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it's hard to fix. — Rob Pike

Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building. — Rob Pike

You have to make a decision whether it's a new product or you integrate it with an existing product. It takes time to work these things out. — Rob Pike

Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces. — Rob Pike

When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. — Rob Pike

Productivity is most important by engineering management rules, but enjoyment is most important for engineers. One stems from the other. — Rob Pike

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad. — Rob Pike

Dynamic typing is not necessarily good. You get static errors at run time, which you really should be able to catch at compile time. — Rob Pike

Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. — Rob Pike

Caches aren't architecture, they're just optimization. — Rob Pike

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge. — Rob Pike

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago. — Rob Pike

If POSIX threads are a good thing, perhaps I don't want to know what they're better than. — Rob Pike

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. — Rob Pike

There's nothing in computing that can't be broken by another level of indirection. — Rob Pike

We don't believe we've solved the multicore-programming problem. But we think we've built an environment in which a certain class of problems can take advantage of the multicore architecture. — Rob Pike

Procedure names should reflect what they do; function names should reflect what they return — Rob Pike

Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing. — Rob Pike

Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming. — Rob Pike

A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate. — Rob Pike

We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better. — Rob Pike

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy. — Rob Pike

Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages. — Rob Pike