I grew up with MATLAB, where extracting a subset of a vector V was easy as feeding a vector of indices into a vector. For example entries i thru j could be had with V(i:j) and an more complicated index scheme could be accomplished with a vector of indices i_index and then V(i_index).
In Maxima, first(), last(), firstn(), rest(), and most generally makelist() allows for all that and more but with a little more cumbersome calling protocols. Here are one-liners that achieve something like the two canonical MATLAB examples above:
The MaximaList 