I think to the contrary, programming language design as an area is flourishing now more than it has in a couple of decades. The availability of the JVM and JS as targets are freeing people up to experiment with lot's of different languages. Sure a lot of the things in these languages have been seen in some form before, but because there is so much cross-interaction between language features, putting things together in tasteful and elegant ways can be very innovative in the PL context.

It's easy to forget that Lisp, Haskell, Python, etc, didn't just spring forth fully formed. I read a great history of Lisp recently: http://www.dreamsongs.com/NewFiles/Hopl2.pdf. A lot of the features in Common Lisp we take for granted today were the product of various dialects and splinters of Lisp over the years.