I switched to using Python from Java for coding interviews and it almost felt like cheating. List comprehensions and the like don't necessarily trivialize many interview problems, but they certainly make them much quicker to solve.

I can see why you feel it's cheating, but I think it's simply using the right tool for the job -- instead of worrying about which headers to include and what the exact C++ type specification for a map iterator is ... in Python, you can think about the actual problem at hand, rather than arcana.