personally I am motivated to consider programming languages as a tool for mathematicians in this context, as I don't actually use math that looks anything like that in my life. :D And sure, why not use ɛ or σ or whatever — in that context, it is actually more legible.

(Although, I have to say, my preference would be to support superscript numbers as direct method calls, not variable names. eg 2² = 2 ** 2 = 4, etc.)