I’ve spent a month or so trying to make an effort to learn Python, mostly by forcing myself to do any new ‘prototype’ vision / OpenCV work in the language. This has cost me some money – I only charge for ‘productive’ time, not ‘learning’ time, and at times the temptation to go back to ‘nice familiar C++’ has been great. But I’ve made good progress with Python, and I’m glad I’ve stuck at it. Apart from anything else, the language itself isn’t hard to pick up.
The pros and cons from a computer vision perspective are roughly as expected. It can be slower to run, but depending on how the code is written, it’s not a big difference. Once ‘inside’ the OpenCV functions, the speed appears to be about the same (as you’d expect: it’s just a wrapper for the same code), but any code run actually in Python needs careful planning, and if large amounts of compution were going to be done, C++ would no doubt still be the best bet.
But anything it lacks in runtime speed, it certainly makes up for in speed of development. As a prototyping language, I think I’m already more productive in Python than C++ (and that’s after 20+ years of C++, and a month of part-time Python). There will always be more to learn, of course, but I think I’m at the point where the learning curve is beginning to get less steep.