I'm not super familiar with C++, but I imagine you'd need some chicanery to access privates, while in python you can just use them by name.

Well, you can always cast and access stuff by memory address.

I can't rally upvote this without breaking the rules about obscenities. But I'll give it a :)

In python, if any of this gives you an trouble you can just replace the stuff in the class dict with your own functions. You don't even need to cast.