[dfox]

For traditional smalltalk systems (ie. anything except GNU Smalltalk), that textual representation is generated by serializing the object graph. And the traditional text format is not exactly designed to be human editable, also it does not describe classes as self-contained concept, it is stream of expressions interspersed with strings that get magically processed by something that was setup by previous expressions (eg. Behavior>>#methodsFor: switches the deserializer state into this second mode).

The problem with Smalltalk is that you lose all it's power when you stop using the IDE. The idea that Smalltalk's runtime metaobject system is somehow equivalent to Lisp's macros is completely wrong, but the system as a whole is powerful enough to make it look like that it does not need macros, because:

1) the IDE automates many things away (but often by doing textual transformations on the source code) 2) the general ST programming culture builds heavily on monkey patching (which is also usually somehow automated by the IDE)

Even with this, ST is also where the whole idea of design patterns started, with half of the patterns being workarounds around insufficiently expressive language (ie. no macros and multiple different "callable" types/syntax categories).