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Another possibility: wrappers in Sage for accessing other programs. Working on something completely separate today, I came across the following note of David Joyner and David Kohel (from 2008) describing how to use GAP from within Sage for group theory computations. Near the end (section 5.6), they note that a number of GAP functions are not accessible from Sage and explain how to write a wrapper which will add this functionality to Sage.

In particular, I was looking for the LieAlgebra GAP functions, which still seem to not be in Sage.

They write:

anyone with time and a basic understanding of group theory and Python/SAGE can do this

They also provide a good warning which deserves to be more than a footnote: _be sure that the functions you add aren't already part of Sage_! Looking through the documentation will give you a good idea of what's already there, and it's recommended to send an e-mail to sage-devel before you start working on something to see if it's already in progress.