I hope this question is suitable for the site.
I recently had to work with Mathematica, and the experience was, to put it kindly, unpleasing. I do not have much experience with similar programs, but I remember not liking much Matlab or Maple either. The result is that I am a mathematician who likes programming, but I never managed to learn how to work with a computer algebra system.
Does there exist a CAS which can be programmed using a standard language? I guess the best thing would be just an enormous library of mathematical algorithms implemented for C or Python or whatever.
I know SAGE is based on Python, but as far as I understand (which is not much) it just collects preexisting open source software, so (I assume) one has to learn how to use a new tool for every different problem.