The important question isn't necessarily: Is it worth it, without the ecosystem? The more interesting questions is: What does this language add?
For example, I need to deal with some unix process management tasks. I'm not crazy enough to do them in straight C, so I'm using python for it's strong C bindings, so I can use system calls in C with python level control flow. However, there's a lot to be desired, because dealing with all this concurrency and inherent raciness of the system in a language like python is a royal pain in the rearside.
Similar things with java and performant programming. Some of my major programs at work don't use the java ecosystem outside of log4j, junit, apache commons lang and apache commons collections. They use java, because java is darned fast without being as brittle as C or as nuts as C++. So java adds a lot of really cheap development security.
Designing yet another language that puts the existing features together with just a tiny difference doesn't add anything. I've enjoyed looking at experimental languages, and I've enjoyed tinkering around with ideas myself some time ago. But by now, I've accepted I'm not smart or talented enough to make something worthwile, and it will be some time until an interesting new breakthrough occurs.
My problem is quite the opposite: when the languages are so different from what already exists, people (and even myself) have trouble thinking about how adoption would even occur, at least in the short term.
A lot of languages have made one major mistake: It's not easy to get a development environment going, and some even wanted me to not use vim.
The first step to some kind of adoption is that I can get it running with an "aptitude install crazy-foo-language-dk", maybe after adding a repository. After that, crazy-foo or crazy-fooc should be interpreter and/or compiler, and that's that.
Ya, well, my languages include their own development environments (I see no different from language and IDE, actually). Smalltalk was great in this regard also, to the chagrin of many developers who wanted to use vim.
Have to figure it takes 10-20 years to grow an industrial strength language. It takes a lot of faith in an idea or stubbornness ( probably both ) to go through that struggle. I admire people with that kind of dedication and I wish exploring the language design space wasn't such an enormous investment.
