Most languages focus on productivity, because that is where the market it is. Safety critical systems are not dominated at all by productivity concerns, and a lot of resources are thrown at them to make sure they are perfect. In this case, the abstractions provided by any HLL just get in the way! Its like putting a cattle guard on front of a tank.

Anyways, you might want to read the stack overflow article on this subject:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/243387/which-languages-ar...