Emacs has Paredit which actively prevents you from typing unbalanced parentheses (short of C-Q ( to force-insert a literal one, or other craziness). Inserting an open paren also inserts a closing one. Backspacing over a paren either deletes both the opening and closing paren, or neither. There are shortcuts to wrap a bare word in new parens, kick a word out of currently enclosing parens, expand parens to slurp up more nearby words, and so on.
Something like
imap ( ()<Left> can get you started in Vim. But what’s the best way to emulate some of the other more powerful features of Paredit in Vim?
May I suggest my bracketing system?
NB: prefer to fetch it directly from the svn repository, the new version is much more easier to tune to our needs.
If you are interested in the details/do-it-yourself-way, have a look at the related tip on vim.wikia.