[SiempreViernes]

On the other hand, how much sense does it make to keep overloading the same finite set of ~50 symbols? And while the admonition to stick to convention is a good general rule, there are both places where there exists conflicting conventions as well as areas where no convention exist at all.

As for the criticism that emoji can't be handwritten or pronounced: show me anyone doing a proper xi, and ask the greek what they think of how foreigners pronounce their letters (or indeed how one pronounces bold face letters). Clearly these are problems that have been solved before, and so can be solved again to the same level of quality.

Further, when handwriting you really have far more freedom than when typesetting, I had a friend that taught me the useful shorthand of just drawing a sphere to indicate that the surface integral was over a sphere. I tend to name partial results things like boxes or triangles when I work out because lugging around a second or even third "a" is just not as clear. Importantly, it's also much more fun to call your partial integral "small house" than "iii".

All that being said, the example choices in the article seem like straight up bad choices: naming the sides of a triangle a specific direction seems unhelpful in the fairly common case of several triangles with opposite orientation for example.