Rob Pike

Computer Science Canadian 1959 102 quotes

Software engineer who co-created the Go programming language and advanced distributed systems.

Quotes by Rob Pike

Less is more.

General philosophy

A little copying is better than a little dependency.

Go Proverbs 2007

Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.

Go Proverbs 2007

Concurrency is not parallelism.

Concurrency Is Not Parallelism (talk) 2012

The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.

Notes on Programming in C 1989

Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small.

Notes on Programming in C 1989

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 the central thing.

Notes on Programming in C 1989

Clear is better than clever.

Go Proverbs 2007

Errors are values.

Go blog post 2011

Reflection is never clear.

Go Proverbs 2007

With the right data structures, the algorithms write themselves.

General philosophy

The bigger the interface, the weaker the abstraction.

Go Proverbs 2007

Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.

General philosophy

Don't just check errors, handle them gracefully.

Go Proverbs 2007

Design the architecture, name the components, and then write the code.

General philosophy

The key to performance is elegance, not complexity.

General philosophy

A good API is a simple API.

General philosophy

The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

Talk at Google 2002

Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of compiled languages with the expressiveness and fun of interpreted languages.

Introducing Go 2009

The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read code.

General philosophy