Learning to read smalltalk

Smalltalk has a very simple grammar (it must be true because all the books say so). However, just because the syntax is easy, that doesn't mean it is necessarily easy to understand the code. Take this as an example

renderContentOn: html 
html table: [(self sortBlock 
value: (self filterBlock value: self items)) 
do: [:item | html tableRow: [self renderItemBlock 
value: item 
value: html]]].

I struggled with this for a while, mainly because I was trying to read it left to right. Whereas, what I should have been doing is reading it in unary, binary, keyword order. When you look at it that way the central block becomes more like this:

1. get the list of items
2. filter them by passing the complete item list to the filter block
3. sort the item list that is returned by the filterblock
4. iterate over the sorted list and render them.

It all makes perfect sense, once you get the hang of it.