Well, 99% of those are silly little "my first programming language" thingys, and these are easy (if you care about those things) to recognize and ignore. They i

Well, 99% of those are silly little "my first programming language" thingys, and these are easy (if you care about those things) to recognize and ignore. They invariably focus on syntax: removing the semicolon, or braces, or some other trivial thing along these lines. BTW even those can be useful for PL researchers as the language may have an interesting new idea or a new way of doing things. Highly unlikely, but does happen. On the negative side, and this is really bad, some of these may be picked up simply because they are new, and then they just create negative value for people that pick them up (e.g. Coffescript) and fragmentation. Then they get abandoned because there is another newer thing. Sad. Then there a languages made by people with background in creating viable (as in not-just-academic) languages. Typescript and Go comes to mind. These are good and "we" need them. These may add new features to the table, eg generics or union types or goroutines. There is no easy answer to your question, my best answer is "depends on who made it".