Rust didn’t start in academia! It was a practitioner’s pet language until Mozilla started sponsoring its development. It’s actually the exact opposite of an academic language like OCaml and Scala, which were started by researchers in universities. Rust did incorporate some academic ideas like the borrow checker and algebraic data types, but the former was already being used in a precursor language, and the latter was almost becoming mainstream (which it is now, Rust helped a lot with that but was one of several languages that had it).