The SR Programming Language introduced novel language semantics for distributed computing:

https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/sr/

She kept describing Linda and tuple-spaces as being so "weird" (she must have said the word "weird" 8 times) but it sounded like typical distributed messaging (e.g. Tibco Rendezvous) to me - not weird at all.

The ABS language is another interesting language stuck in academia: http://abs-models.org/documentation/manual/

I would personally attribute this to the "mere exposure effect", a psychological phenomena described a century ago that stands the test of time until today (mostly, please Google for references).

In Layman's terms: we are attracted to things we are familiar to, yet curious for novelty. If something - a programming paradigm for instance - is too unfamiliar, it is naturally rejected by our own cognitive biases.