Such things have been done many many times in the past, with varying degrees of success.
IMNSHO they need to provided a white paper describing
- the difficulties with current standard practice
- how their features mitigate those difficulties
- why the features they have chosen work well together
- why that set of features is necessary and sufficient
with references to where those features have been implemented successfully in the past. If they can't do that then they have just produced Yet Another Language Repeating Past Mistakes.
A good example of what is necessary is
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/langenv-140151.html i.e. the original Java whitepaper from 1996.
For what it is worth, adopting those principles has been very successful for me. My language trajectory was Algol-60, C, HiLo, Smalltalk, Java, VHDL (and minor HDLs), with diversions into Objective-C, Prolog and various throwaway scripting languages. I avoided falling into the trap of wasting my time with, amongst others, C++, Delphi, Pascal, Modula, PERL, and others I can't instantly recall!