In January I published Jupiter, a programming language based on Smalltalk. One of its main features is the ‘Unix Friendly’ philosophy, meaning, its source code is stored in plain text files, which is not usual in the Smalltalk world.

The plain text source files offers some interesting advantages like integration with version control system (git, mercurial, etc…) and the posibility of use any text editor, but all of the existing source code editors are optimized to edit large files with lots of code entities, and Jupiter only allows one method per file, so using those editors, while it is perfectly posible, is not the ideal development environment.

This is why I created Juno, a Smalltak-like IDE for Jupiter. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Another advantage of using simple text files is that I can use any technology for interaction with the source of Jupiter, this way I could develop Juno with existing GUI tools ( I used Electron and React ). In the Long-term view, the idea would be create an IDE using Jupiter, but since is a new programming language, I lack of the tools needed for this task. In the meantime, while Jupiter grows, I can use an IDE that feels like a real Smalltalk environment.

As always, contributions are very much welcome. Just open a pull request or an issue in Github :)