It's fun to go look at the actual implementation of those primitives in languages and libraries and see how complex they can be under the hood. Some of them incorporate two or three algorithms and switch them on the fly based on profiling the incoming data. I remember being startled to learn that Cocoa's "NSString" supports ropes, caching of transforms, and I think even some translation primitives, all quietly switching on and off as needed.

Developers have less control over the particulars (and may miss optimization opportunities if they can make guarantees about the shape of the problem) but it benefits the common case.