What software is used to develop complex programs like 'Adobe InDesign'?

Question

I want to find out:
What software is used to develop complex programs like 'Adobe InDesign'?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Just to expand a bit for anyone who is interested:
Virtually all commercial software like InDesign, Photoshop, etc., is written these days in C or C++. That's not so much because C is such a vastly better language than anything else, it's more because in its advent it was vastly better than anything else at the time, and as a result, all software programmers know C by default. And once you have the beginnings of a codebase in C and a pool of software engineers who all know C, there is little reason to rewrite your code in some other language from scratch.
Your question about software pertains more to the IDE that is used to write the code. That will obviously vary from one company to another and could be as simple as a plain text editor coupled with a command-line C compiler, to any number of commercial IDEs that all basically accomplish the same thing. For a long time in the elder days, virtually all code development on the Mac was done with CodeWarrior, but these days practically everyone on the Mac just uses Apple's own Xcode environment. For Windows development, the two real biggies are either Microsoft's Visual Studio (probably 90% of all Windows development is done using this IDE) and to a lesser degree, C++Builder, formerly owned by Borland but now by Embarcadero.
When building the code into an executable package, the underlying compiler that most commercial software developers use is Intel's own compiler. The IDEs above all include their own free compilers; Intel's is a commercial product that is more finely tuned for Intel processors and produces cleaner machine code. On the Mac, Apple just uses GCC, a free open-source compiler that has been developed and used for many years by the Unix and Linux community.