You could even argue that Rust is a member of the ML family seeing as the ML family of languages were major inspirations and furthermore I believe the original implementation of Rust was written in OCaml.
As a scientific programmer interested in functional-flavoured (ie undogmatic) languages, I would do Rust immediately if it had a REPL. Dying to dump Python. This post is very convincing on Rust's design decisions:
This post was a total revelation to me, even if I assume it's well known in the community, because it is very credible on the Sophie's Choice issue of mathematical purity versus acknowledgement of the reality of the instruction pointer-based imperative machine that exists underneath.
I've looked at other languages that "do" multiprocessing recently. Go is great, but it's essentially about getting large teams of variable-skill people to work together well. It's not an inspiring language, whereas Rust clearly is. Erlang (via Elixir) is very interesting, but the actor model will never be as performant in reality as the shared memory architecture. Julia is just a modern interpretation of matlab. A number of the JVM languages are great, but the "culture" of that ecosystem will always be corporate.
This is why I believe the science crowd could really gravitate to Rust, because it may have the ability, like the functional crowd, to satisfy the "search for beauty" aspect which motivates many academics, scientists, and indeed, programmers, all the while staying just the right side of pragmatism. And clearly targeting "where the puck is going" on massively multicore hardware.
The trial-and-error nature of scientific/data science discovery inevitably requires a REPL. If I had the right compiler/interpreter skills I would gladly contribute to making a Rust REPL happen. Unfortunately I don't. As it stands, all I can say is that if the REPL happens, I would be axed to contribute on the Rust scientific ecosystem with great motivation and pleasure.