I have a number of ideas about this, but I'll limit myself observing that Ken Iverson's language design was all about expressing useful concepts from mathematics, concisely [and this was originally in the context of describing computing hardware - what is a memory operation, what is a register, what does "add with carry" really mean, that sort of thing - and it's something of a happy accident that it was later implemented as a programming language]. Anyways, among other things:
Searching is a primitive (actually, several primitives -- "search" can be an ambiguous term)
Sorting is a primitive (mostly - and this really deserves something blog length, describing the nuances of this part of the design).
Iteration is built into the primitives - you do not need recursion or loops in many (but not all) contexts.
These three features, alone, might represent more than half of most of the code I've seen (if we look at its purpose, rather than its details).