For Python, I agree to an extent. The machinery is hidden of course. That's the price of the convenience of a dynamic scripting language. But one still can see the relevant things. For example, for a subscripting operation, what counts is often only the mathematical aspect of it: It's a right-unique relation (i.e. a mathematical function) applied to the given element. And it's reasonably fast - even in Python with dicts, we can assume O(1) for most purposes.

It's nice when these important properties are indicated by a visual clue (square brackets).

> A sufficiently-powerful programming language enables the programmer to develop the abstractions he needs for the problem he has.

Sure. And that programming language still happens to be C for many, many purposes.