Seeing your use of past-tense here, I have to plug: I'm a 25 year+ Csound enthusiast. Still very happily composing with Csound along with the rest of the small but committed community. Being a lifelong programmer, I prefer it to Pd, Max and Supercollider, and think many HN folks would too.
Yes to this! For many purposes, Csound is hard to beat. It has some truly incredible sounding opcodes, and it’s capable of sample-accurate performance in a way that Pd or Max can’t really achieve, even with the Max scheduler in overdrive.
On top of all that, there are externals for Max and Pd to run Csound within those environments. You can get the best of both worlds! Csound is still very relevant and useful.
https://csound.com/
You may find better instruction material than you had in the past in the excellent Csound Floss manual.
https://flossmanual.csound.com/