Looking at contrieved legal texts, which is a better comparison with code than poetry, I don't agree. I don't even agree that there would be the english languag

Looking at contrieved legal texts, which is a better comparison with code than poetry, I don't agree. I don't even agree that there would be the english language. Legalese uses a ton of latin ididoms, arcane rights and philosophies. This is comparable to the cruft of C or C++ standards. For a microkernel of some thousand LOC you shouldn't need a multi-paradigm language. seL4 did it in Haskel, which is a step in the right direction. Then it was ported to a provably safe subset of C.