Yes you could use Python for this sort of thing. The link you posted is just using a kernel spi driver that Python can write to just as well as C++ can (via it's /dev/spidev0.0 file). There is a python library that can talk to SPI in Python on the pi:
http://www.100randomtasks.com/simple-spi-on-raspberry-pi You still need to know some low-level stuff though. Like hexadecimal, binary bit-wise operations, etc. Definitely talk to people on the Raspberry Pi forum. They are doing this stuff frequently. Also don't be afraid of C. Learn it. You'll be glad. The code you linked to looks more complicated than it really is. The ioctl stuff looks complicated. But everything else is easy. If it weren't for the ioctl stuff, which I know can be translated to Python directly but I'm not quite sure how at the moment, the rest of that code could be transliterated into Python in very short order. The trick is to make the code more pythonic, and use classes when appropriate to encapsulate things. I'd make a class that talks to SPI, for example. It would open the file, set the ioctls, and then provide a basic interface for writing to the bus. Then from that I'd build another class that implements the matrix abstraction, using SPI class for the low-level stuff. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list