Matlab, mathematica or SAGE

I can pirate the first two or use the last one(GNUUUUUUUU and Python) which one is cool for mathematics oriented software engineering and has less bullshit to deal with?

I really prefer MATLAB. Mathematica came across as useless for anything that didn't require symbolic math and programmers seldom require that. The syntax was also ugly.

MATLAB's matrix manipulation ability is its' strongest point, but it really does make it a strong candidate for lots of different problems. MATLAB also comes out of the box with tons of useful libraries. You'll never use most of them, but it's still nice to have. I also strongly recommend using GNU Octave over MATLAB as it improved on the language in a couple of ways.

Happy scripting.