From Rust in Perspective by Linus Walleij
The ambition of Rust is, as I perceieve it, and whether the people driving it even knows it or not, to finish what the ALGOL committe as primus motor started in 1958, and what the Garmisch NATO conference concluded was necessary in 1968: to develop a language for systems programming that rely on formal logic proof, and to fulfil what ALGOL never could, what Pascal never could, and what the whole maybe-not-700 functional programming languages never could: a language that joins the disciplines of computer science and software Engineering into ONE discipline, where the scholars of each can solve problems together.
Or if the above is to long, another quote from the same article:
TL;DR: my claim is that Rust is attempting to raise the abstraction in the programming language and ultimately to join computer science and software engineering into one single discipline, an ambition that has been around since these disciplines were created.