Ask HN: Programming languages and audio/sound

Hello,

I am not a programmer perse' but have done a lot of base MIDI and Max/msp stuff.

But...

I am curious what baseline language(s) would be the best for somebody like myself to begin learning if I wanted to write apps from the ground up, say plug ins or hypothetically write my own custom sound engine for video games ( max and csound not included)... and maybe even write my own audio codec.

I would also like peoples opinion on what they would suggest as starting language(s) to learn for web audio. (lets say I wanted to write a player like VLC , or at least hack it)

Ok ... that's all.