It seems that most the time its not the language but the tools built around the language. I still think that MPS by JetBrains really is just sitting along waiting for someone to pick it up. I'm not associated with it. I had just tried it out for a bit at some point, but essentially it gives you a base framework for building a language on par with what their IntelliJ IDE can do much like Visual Studio with their ReSharper.
All you have to do it tell it what you want the language to look like, how to reactor it, do auto-complete, have its type-systems, etc. What makes it interesting is that it used an in memory AST with a projectional editor instead of doing text parsing which allows for some interesting features.
Of course then you are not going to get text files, but then you get to the point where: * You can't have the scenario where your parenthesis or brackets don't line up * Hypothetically, any developer could have custom formatting that still is represented as the same data. * The editor can render tables or charts to represent a piece of data. (state-machines come to mind)
Of course said data format to store all of this could be something other then plain text files with parable code. Then again, most the stuff these days is stored or transmitted in JSON anyways. Its really a breeze to use, and there is bound to be a library in every language on every system that can easily parse it. And its still text.
At least, maybe the future does not have to be more syntax parsing but instead more of this proportional editor sort of stuff. Just an idea.