Rob Pike Quotes

We can build a better product than Linux.

On a purely technical side, I'm really very happy with how Linux gets used in a very wide set of different areas. It's important for development.

I am a programmer.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.

A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.

TV and the press have always functioned according to the same sets of rules and technical standards. But the Internet is based on software. And anybody can write a new piece of software on the Internet that years later a billion people are using.

Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web as a set of protocols for transferring, linking and addressing documents to send over the Net. Without the global reach and open technical standards of the Internet, the Web could never have proliferated as it did.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.

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.

I was surprised about vi going in, though, I didn't know it was in System V.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

World Wide Web: Proposal for a HyperText Project

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him.

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

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.

There is no system but GNU and Linux is one of it's kernels

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer.

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.

From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.