Maxima is quite awkward to use IME. Because of its age it has very nonstandard syntax for some things, like ":" for assignment, and "(..., ..., ...)" for block

Maxima is quite awkward to use IME. Because of its age it has very nonstandard syntax for some things, like ":" for assignment, and "(..., ..., ...)" for blocks of commands (equivalent to e.g. "{...; ...; ...}" in C, JavaScript, Java, etc.). I prefer Sympy.