1. If you are prototyping and prefer working on a remote server, have a look at(https://notebooks.azure.com/), memory is limited to 4Gb but its free and jupyter notebooks are great for prototyping.
2. For prototyping you should try and do REPL driven development, what I mean is that you should be ok with just playing around with the library API before you write a longish-running processing task, that would reduce(not remove) the chances of a runtime error. Jupyter notebooks excel in this too as you can just try out code in a cell, learn from it, rinse and repeat. You can also use your IDE to send code fragments to REPL and get immediate feedback on them. This way of iterative development would make sure that the speed of your feedback cycle isn't slow. If python's feedback cycle seems slower to you than C++, you are definitely not using the REPL enough :)
3. If debugging is a pain point definitely give an IDE a try, I prefer Visual Studio as I am on Windows. You can very well go with Pycharm or vscode(not technically an IDE but has a debugger so that's that). I personally prefer Jupyter notebook or Emacs with my code and REPL in split windows for prototyping, different strokes for different folks.
I personally love working with python, I even write my blog posts in a Jupyter Notebook so although it isn't perfect, it doesn't have to be frustrating either :) Hope my suggestions can be of some help!