It implies completely lack of knowledge that something like that already exists, predating Rust by a few decades.
The contexts where it pops up, it is as if it would be yet to come, such language.
Speaking of C and BCPL, indeed we do, because many wrongly believe in this urban myth, that without them there was nothing else as high level systems programming languages, even though JOVIAL came to be in 1958, followed by ALGOL and PL dialects, Bootstrap CPL was never planned to be used beyond that purpose, and there was a rich research outside Bell Labs in systems programming in high level languages.
Instead we got stuck with something that 50 years later are still trying to fix, with Rust being part of the solution.
> It implies completely lack of knowledge that something like that already exists, predating Rust by a few decades.
I don't understand why you think this: we explain things all the time without presuming that the particular choice of explanation implies ignorance of a preceding concept. In high school physics, for example, you wouldn't assume that your teacher doesn't know who Ptolemy is because they start with Newton.
The value of an explanation is in its effectiveness, not a pedantic lineage of the underlying concept. The latter is interesting, at least to me, but I'm not going to bore my readers by walking them through 65 years of language evolution just to get back to the same basic concept that they're able to intuit immediately from a ~6 line code snippet.
(It's also condescending to do so: there's no evidence whatsoever that Rust's creators, maintainers, community, etc. aren't familiar with the history of PL development.)
For what it's worth, you're right. I saw the same thing happen with Go: everyone seems to think that Go invented static linking and gasp compiling executables, seemingly ignorant of the fact that we actually used to do that all the time, before bloated dynamic runtimes and massive virtual machines even existed. I don't trust software "experts" who don't know their history, because they usually don't know a lot of other important things, either.
The contexts where it pops up, it is as if it would be yet to come, such language.
Speaking of C and BCPL, indeed we do, because many wrongly believe in this urban myth, that without them there was nothing else as high level systems programming languages, even though JOVIAL came to be in 1958, followed by ALGOL and PL dialects, Bootstrap CPL was never planned to be used beyond that purpose, and there was a rich research outside Bell Labs in systems programming in high level languages.
Instead we got stuck with something that 50 years later are still trying to fix, with Rust being part of the solution.