The comment you linked to is pretty strange, given the limited number of symbols in the Greek and Latin alphabets, there’s obviously going to be a lot of reuse, but I can’t see how that could really cause any confusion though, unless you’re just grabbing books from the shelf and opening them at random. And even then, it should almost always be clear from context if pi is a number or a plane, and if it’s a function that will be visually distinguished.

I’ve seen non-mathematicians use words as names of variables and functions, it always makes me shudder. I unsuccessfully tried to introduce Hebrew letters as an alternative,when I discovered how to use the in Latex, but it never caught on…

I actually find math notation incredibly intuitive and effective, I think it’s close to optimal. In fact it’s only after getting into programming that it even occurred to me how elegant and magical it is. I understand what things mean and can write things myself, without being able to exactly explain how, or to translate it into a fully specified system that a computer would understand.