Why is it necessary to do something that looks dirty? To me, "usability" means I shouldn't have to care about endianness, pointers, all the superfluous mental overhead of C et al. If you program in Python, at best you need to care about whether something is a float or int (or string if read from file). In recent Python versions we no longer have to care if a string is unicode or not (they're all unicode now); that is precisely progress in usability.
