I notice that the text to speech system is so incomplete that it blows up when handed any text that has punctuation in it.

While it would be nice if it knew enough to pause for commas and periods etc. it's amazing that it won't even ignore a character it doesn't know...

While I am a programmer, I'm new to Smalltalk, so it may be a while before I'm submitting fixes myself... How does that work anyway? Is Squeak really open source?

I am impressed with squeak.  My first impression is that Smalltalk is a vastly superior system for building GUIs than everything that came after it.  For rapid development, you can't beat a typeless language who's classes can be queried and added to in real time.  It looks to me like everyone copied bits of message passing and then copied some OO concepts and missed the importance of having:
1. an interactive language 
2. a built in database describing the system 
3. a typeless language to make rapid and flexible prototyping possible

Joshua Scholar
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