Prototyping in Python for a large subset of people is NOT friendly. To quote a famous book or something; "My God, it's full of shapes!". Shapes whose shape matter, just not so much to the language and tooling you interface with them from. It's like trying to drive a 3d world from a 2d world :|
IMHO F# has the potential to be WAY more friendly for prototyping and more. It's all a matter of the libs.