Sadly, there has been comparatively few developments in keyboard hardware and input schemes since the 60s.

Julia has support for unicode in the language (unicode identifiers, etc) and even has some operators/functions (they are the same thing in julia) aliased as their usual symbols, like "in" is aliased to "∈".

[0] http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/stdlib/collections/...

That doesn't look very different from the letter x though, I think I'd still prefer the asterisk even if there was a × button on my keyboard.