Coming from a mostly-Python background myself, I'm curious if you've looked into F# for this. It's succinct like Python, gives you type safety, and you can use .NET libraries.
The experiment was "How productive and portable is .NET Core?" knowing that F# is there as a possibility. I dabbled in the tangentially similar OCaml a long time ago, but had wanted to just move fast to answer "Is .NET is a reasonable technical choice for cross-platform tooling I need?" So far it's been a pretty solid "Yes."