Syntax is tricky and contentious, and our team members do love our Schemes. Members of the Pyret team have actually done some research on the issue of parenthetical expressions in introductory programming, and seen that parens aren't necessarily the best:

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mfk-va...

One issue is that it's too regular: since open-paren means so many different things (start of a "defun", start of a function application, start of an argument list in a "defun", start of a syntactic form like "cond" or "if", start of a clause of "code", the list goes on), a typo can easily and drastically change the kind of error message you get.

More closely matching syntactic forms to the type of behavior the expression has will hopefully let us improve error messages and grokkability of the difference between concepts. We're collecting data about common syntax errors and actively asking what we can do better in syntax design based on what we observe about Pyret's use.