Lua is a far better counter-example as a successful small and (conceptually) beautiful language.

yes, probably so. was going for 'popularity' here

> "dynamic loosely typed"

Both Python and Scheme are dynamic but strongly typed.

I think you may be missing some terminology here. Strong typing is about whether entities have definite types and resist type coercion. Ad-hoc typing in dynamic languages can make this hard to see, but it's still there. What would prevent you from calling a function with invalid arguments would be static typing, which Python and Scheme do not have.

the significant difference between python and scheme here is that python is not small.

but then, scheme is heading in the same direction if you look at the latest standards development

Depends on what you mean by "latest". R6RS is arguably huge. That's why they decided to split R7RS in two, a small core which is done and a huge version which, ironically, is still in the making.

R7RS is still in the making, not because it is bigger, rather due to politics that many don't agree with it ever happening.

The small core exists, because that was the only subset their were willing to agree on.

right, it may not happen, but at least some people want to add stuff to scheme that will make it larger, to eventually reach the point where it no longer can be called a small language.

i don't know if/when that point will be reached. my comment was hinting at the potential for scheme to become larger.