> > And for those of us that find this 'shout' stuff to be an annoying, 
> > garish, pointless distraction?
> 
> Personally, I don't use Shout, and I think this whole pipe 
> thing is a silly waste of time. I've been using Smalltalk 
> continuously for 20 years now, and I think the clean simple 
> syntax is great. 

So do I, but it isn't perfect and at times it can get a bit verbose when
doing conditionals or working with the collection hierarchy while trying to
avoid temporary variables.

> I also personally never use the literal 
> collection syntax {a.b.c}, because I prefer most of the 
> baseline non-UI Squeak that I write to be easily portable to 
> other Smalltalks.

If one chooses to only write portable Smalltalk, what's the point in having
different distributions?  Squeak "IS" the experimental Smalltalk, the
proving ground for things that might later be accepted by those other
distributions.  If every Smalltalk had the same literal array syntax, I have
no doubt everyone would use them because they are clearly syntactically
better than the alternative.

> Later,
> Jon
> 
> ps - since I just turned 40 a couple days ago, that means 
> I've been using Smalltalk for half my life - pretty cool :-)

Congrats!

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com