Sure, but that's because there was a good library available, little to do with Python vs C++. If there was an equally good C++ image library available then it

Sure, but that's because there was a good library available, little to do with Python vs C++. If there was an equally good C++ image library available then it would have been equally simple in C++. Of course the thing is that, in general, there may well NOT have been such a C++ library, and this is what makes languages such as Java and Python popular - because of the breadth of libraries available. For C++ image manipulation I've found libvips to be decent, but the point still stands that for a given problem there may not be decent libraries available.