One thing that always comes up is a suggestion for using Unicode. There are obvious downsides--the Unicode multiplication character isn't easy to type; even if Python and major code editors are fully Unicode friendly, code often has to go through channels that may not be; etc. But it's worth asking whether the numeric community has considered this and rejected it for these reasons, or for other reasons, or if they'd be happy with it but just didn't think Python was ready for it, or whatever.