[Tomte]

Rust is extremely new, with way fewer people who have tried it. So there wasn't much opportunity to change someone's career (both on the time and the people axis).

Additionally, Rust is a very well-engineered language, but it has few ground-breaking attributes. The borrow checker has never appeared in a non-esoteric language before, I guess. Most of the other goodies could have blown people's minds long before in another language.

[dochtman]

I think the borrow checker is actually pretty mind-blowing. In general, I'd say that the combination of modern language features with a real systems target (i.e. low-level, no GC) certainly has the potential to be game changing, in the sense of making it that much less scary to write things in a systems language.