[shakow]

> It’s really not abnormal to have to include parens after a method name in a language

That's not what he means. Assuming some pseudocode with a more common syntax to prune the parentheses question, Common lisp is doing this:

    function f(x) { print(x) }
    let a = f
    funcall(a)(27)  # prints 27

Whereas Scheme is doing this:

    function f(x) { print(x) }
    let a = f
    a(27)           # also prints 27

This is the fundamental difference between so-called Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 families, depending on whether functions and variable share the same namespace or if they have to be “lifted” from one to another through funcall.