I don't find Smalltalk's syntax bad per se, but I think there's too much of it. When I see it, my eyes glaze over. Not because I don't understand the concepts behind what is being represented, but because I have a hard time getting a handle on the shape of things.

It's a matter of familiarity, and while I've spent some time looking at the object model I haven't written a lot of code in it. So perhaps that complaint is only really valid for newcomers. On the other hand, I still think it's a bit convoluted since a language like Io can express much the same stuff with less. The postcard version is something like:

    Object setSlot("foo", 12);

That demonstrates the entire informal BNF description at http://iolanguage.org/scm/io/docs/IoGuide.html#Syntax-Expres...

That doesn't account for [] and {} being translated to messages (with their contents as arguments) or for the infix operator stuff (sends the operator message—eg. +, xyzzy, etc.—to LHS with RHS as the argument) which also has precedence. Aside from that there's nothing much going on. Everything except infix operators always look like like regular message sends unless you're using a DSL. I think that's shat Smalltalk ought to look like, since that's what it's trying to be about.

Edit: Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I don't mean Smalltalk should look like Io, but that it should have little more shape than looking like message sends.