After programming in SmallTalk for a while, I'm starting to come round to a similar point of view. I haven't quite made the leap in my day-to-day work yet, but I really am considering it.
Another thing I'm considering to adopt from ST is dropping syntax highlighting. If research on highlighting for natural language can be transferred to code (I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect it might), highlighting might actually be harmful to comprehension. The only thing I'd keep is a slightly lighter colour for comments, as these don't have quite the same status as code. Ideally, I think I'd like to have them deemphasised by moving them off to the margin or something like that, but that requires rather more work than rendering them a lighter colour than the rest of the code.
Another thing I'm considering to adopt from ST is dropping syntax highlighting. If research on highlighting for natural language can be transferred to code (I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect it might), highlighting might actually be harmful to comprehension. The only thing I'd keep is a slightly lighter colour for comments, as these don't have quite the same status as code. Ideally, I think I'd like to have them deemphasised by moving them off to the margin or something like that, but that requires rather more work than rendering them a lighter colour than the rest of the code.