A little bit of both; I'll skip unfamiliarity and get to the awkwardness.
Smalltalk lexical style makes certain kinds of notational customizations difficult to compose. I want multiple kinds of brackets that could get used for DSLs. Slate did manage to make prefixes and suffixes customizable and make much more into operators than Smalltalk allowed, at least.
But we did have extreme whitespace sensitivity between tokens so "3+4" was a single token. That was our fault, even if it enabled many interesting notations.
Yeah, Fortress had a lot of good ideas that we were looking at. We toyed with a way to render and enter unicode operator characters using angle tag notation a la "<circle-plus>". The whitespace idea is interesting but a little dangerous; I think we just need to be able to separate the syntax from the viewer and editor interactions.
Smalltalk lexical style makes certain kinds of notational customizations difficult to compose. I want multiple kinds of brackets that could get used for DSLs. Slate did manage to make prefixes and suffixes customizable and make much more into operators than Smalltalk allowed, at least.
But we did have extreme whitespace sensitivity between tokens so "3+4" was a single token. That was our fault, even if it enabled many interesting notations.