[Tomte]

Depends on the field. Aeronautics and reactor control seem to use "safer languages" like Ada quite a bit.

In factory automation I have only ever seen C, and AFAIK automotive is the same (they seem to be more open to C++, though).

Most of safety-critical development (as I know it -- again, no satelites or nuclear stuff) is documentation, testing and FMEAs. Quite a bit of "patterns" or procedures, as well, like memory testing in the background, redundant variables, cross checks between controllers, plausibility checks etc.

But very, very little focus on saner programming languages.