Pyret's syntax looks far more complicated to learn than Python's for a beginner.
For some perspective, when teaching Pyret to total beginners, we start with arithmetic and calls to library functions, then build up to function definitions and examples. At that point, there's just a handful of syntactic constructs to consider, and they are nearly identical to Python.
Things like "data" and "cases" don't come till later, and do come with more overhead, but also are introduced to students who already have some "finger-feel" with the language. Python has its own overhead with "class" for defining structured data at a similar point, including things like "self" and "__init__".
def square(n):
return n * n
fun square(n :: Number) -> Number:
n * n
end
fun square(n):
n * n
end