Rob Pike Quotes

#1. Productivity is most important by engineering management rules, but enjoyment is most important for engineers. One stems from the other.

Rob Pike

#2. There's no such thing as a simple cache bug.

Rob Pike

#3. Caches aren't architecture, they're just optimization.

Rob Pike

#4. Procedure names should reflect what they do; function names should reflect what they return

Rob Pike

#5. 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

#6. When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.

Rob Pike

#7. Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building.

Rob Pike

#8. Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination

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#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

Rob Pike

#12. 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

#13. We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better.

Rob Pike

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Rob Pike

#17. 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

#18. When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified.

Rob Pike

#19. There's nothing in computing that can't be broken by another level of indirection.

Rob Pike

#20. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

Rob Pike

#21. 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

#22. The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

Rob Pike

#23. Why would you have a language that is not theoretically exciting? Because it's very useful.

Rob Pike

#24. 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

#25. Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces.

Rob Pike

#26. Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing.

Rob Pike

#27. A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate.

Rob Pike

#28. 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

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

Rob Pike