Robert Pike is a programmer known first for his long career at Bell Labs and later for co-creating the Go programming language at Google. He was a member of the Unix research group and went on to help build the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and with Ken Thompson he designed the UTF-8 text encoding that became the dominant way to represent text on the web.
At Google, Pike was one of the three original designers of Go. The Go FAQ records that “Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started sketching the goals for a new language on the white board on September 21, 2007,” and that the work grew from a side project into a full-time effort over the following year.
Pike explained the motivation in his 2012 article “Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering,” writing that “the Go programming language was conceived in late 2007 as an answer to some of the problems we were seeing developing software infrastructure at Google” — problems such as slow builds, sprawling dependencies, and code that was hard to understand.
Concurrency was central to that design. In the same article Pike argued that the “typical Google program” of multicore servers handling many clients “is not especially well served by C++ or Java, which lack sufficient concurrency support at the language level,” and that Go instead provides “a variant of CSP with first-class channels.” That CSP lineage, carried forward from his Bell Labs roots, runs through Go’s goroutines and channels.