> > The Algol, Smalltalk, Pascal, and early Scheme languages were prized for being small and beautiful.
> But they did not achieve widespread adoption.
> Widely used languages need to apply to a wide range of use cases.
A long time ago, an old-timer, even more old-time than me (and I did CS home works on punch cards in PL/I...) was a C fanatic, and was dragging his mainframe colleagues into Unix, said it best: "C does not get in your way."
He (and I) came from an era when eventually pretty much every language eventually "got in your way" and you had to learn the assembly language calling and linking conventions and implement a few nuts & bolts to get your job done. C was the first popular language that didn't eventually knee-cap you like that. That is why C won and Pascal was an intense but passing fad.
To me, that is the essential message for language designers, more important than "keeping it small". Stay out of the programmer's way. Of course, there are different ways of staying out of the way.... Python's "duck typing" is a way of keeping the type checker out of your way. Rust's "unsafe" is a way of keeping the borrow checker out of your way when you really, really, need to carve with your sharpest knife.
So I would argue that "applies to a wide variety of use cases" simplifies to: does not get in your way no matter what your application is.
As an aside: The old timer was a role model to me in one important aspect: Learning to recognize progress when you see it. He not only lived through the transition from core to solid state memory, he lived through the transition from transistor logic to integrated circuits. But he was evangelizing C and Unix when many his age thought the list of interesting programming languages had len()==3: FORTRAN, COBOL, assembly. I took that lesson to heart, and try very hard to answer the question: "Is this progress, or is this just different?".