please excuse the stupidity of my question..
Things like Adobe After Effects, Apple final cut, Pro tools, photoshop.. also, things like Windows media player, real player
What programming languages are used to build those?
I'm really interested in knowing, Thanks
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The ones you've listed are primarily written in C and C++ (with some use of Objective-C on the Mac side.) Other programs may be written in other languages. ;)
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C, C++, Objective C, as usual. You don't need a magical programming language to develop large projects. It is more a matter of management and infrastructure.
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Due to a need for high performance, many of these "larger" applications are written using programming languages that allow access to system resources (memory, cpu, etc.) without many abstractions in the way, in order to allow performance optimizations. Languages that allow such access include C and C++ and in some cases, or some parts of the program may include low-level assembly language.
Languages not suited for high-performance (real or near-realtime) programming tasks due to the inclusion of machine resource access abstractions include Java, C# and Visual Basic.
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Those aren't very "big" applications, Enterprise applications are sometimes mammoth ( I prefer building them in JAVA :) ). For instance an application for traffic analysis used by your telecoms operator. Anyways I know VLC is quite a "large software" and it was made using C++ and qt.
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Have a look into Joel's article http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html Those different worlds described there have different preferences when it comes to programming languages.
As others have stated, Shrinkwrap software is mostly written in C++ or C nowadays, same is correct for (commercial) Games. I suspect you won't consider throwaway software as really large, and perhaps the same applies for embedded software (but don't underestimate the size of the source code base of a modern navigational system).
Internal software systems may be sometimes much larger. There are different preferred programming languages, for example, there exist really large scale systems in the financial business sector written in COBOL. Other business sectors prefer either the Java environment or the Microsoft programming world (VB6, VBA, VB.NET, C#). And high speed numeric computations are still done with (sometimes large scale) Fortran programs.
Joel mentioned also Web application programms. Such software systems are often build using different programming languages for the different layers of the system. For example, Java Script or Flash/Actionscript in the browser, scripting languages like Ruby, Perl, Python or PHP on the Web application server, and some of the other languages mentioned in the Internal category for the backend programs.
The world which is missing is the smartphone/App market (which did not exist 2002 when Joel wrote his article). Most of those existing applications are not very "big" today due to the fact the market has only evolved for a few years.
If you look up many major applications in Wikipedia, they will have a side-box providing information including the development language (where known).
Applications are built using whatever language is relevant to the domain in question. However due to their ubiquitous nature, minimal run-time, general purpose applicability, high performance, extensibility via libraries, and the sheer body of practitioners, C, and C++ are prevalent.
On Windows C++ is likely to be used more often than C for large scale commercial applications, in part due to the fact that with the release of Visual C++ and MFC in the early 1990's, Microsoft made it their preferred development language for Windows. With the release of the .NET framework however, the preferred development language is less of an issue, and C#, VB.NET, C++/CLI and other .NET languages may be used, but few major consumer applications that I am aware of yet use .NET (and if you compare the performance of say the excellent but slow Paint.NET with PhotoShop Elements for example, you can probably see why!), it is used extensively however in bespoke application development (banking sector for example, where the client interface performance is less of an issue).
C is still commonly used on Linux applications. Linux itself is written in C, and its primary API is a C interface. There are plenty of C++ based application interfaces and libraries however, especially for GUI interfaces such as KDE, WxWidgets, and Qt.
OSX and iOS applications are commonly written in Objective-C since that is Apple's preferred development language and OS API.
Android applications are typically written in Java, because the Google Android API is a Java library. But these are not typically "really large softwares"[sic]