From reading the title I thought that 'juggling' and 'tricks' where metaphors for how choosing the right notation in mathematics can make a problem trivial, while choosing the wrong notation can make it nearly impossible. Even though the article is talking about a concrete example of juggling, I think it can still be taken as an appropriate metaphor.

Perhaps the oldest and most obvious example of the power of notation is the invention of algebra itself. Before that, people used to write maths in words. Fermat's Last Theorem for example was stated as:

    It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or 
    a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any 
    power higher than the second, into two like powers.

This isn't very easy to understand! With algebra we can just write

    There are no integers, a, b and c such 
    that a^n + b^n = c^n when n is an integer n > 2.

This is much easier to read once you're familiar with algebra, but much more importantly, the notation is very conducive to being able to manipulate the expression to derive new results from it.

Perhaps that's the criteria for good notation - it makes additional manipulations and insights easy to the point of trivial.