Pyret draws from traditional algebra notation, Python, and OCaml/Haskell. If you do not know any of these, you must be a pretty weak programmer. If you do most of these, you ought to be able to recognize almost every part of it. Anyway, the good news is that programming beginners — who don't know any languages — have no real trouble with it, so any difficulties may say more about the reader's blind-spots than about the language itself.