Ah, but I think it's important to distinguish between ideas that are new in research and ideas that are new in industry. God knows that pattern matching isn't a particularly new concept, but I sure hadn't heard of it before Rust; see also the popularization of list comprehensions due to Python via Haskell. So I think what the grandparent is implying is that even if Rust doesn't end up as a world-shattering language, it still has the opportunity to expose programmers to "new" ideas, even if, in academia's opinion, those ideas aren't so new at all. :)
Exactly, for example, now thanks to the FP concepts that have been added to .NET in the last versions, I am able to do cool FP stuff while coding boring enterprise applications in C#, without having to ask permission about it.
Or make use of F# for Windows scripting, using as excuse to the boss that it is part of Visual Studio.
