Notepad was basically the "Hello world" of win32 apps. A kid in highschool could have "maintained" it.

My first entry-level job just freshly coming out of the University was writing C++ with Qt for a computer vision app. And that was my actual first contact with C++ (had seen C and Java in Uni).

It was no biggie, just joining the low level of C with the class notions from Java. Pair that with the C++FAQ website, and it was easy.

Are entry-level devs generally not able to do that nowadays? I do not believe people are generally more stupid or less capable, so, is education so much worse or what's going on?

But there's no need to change it, that's the point. It's a finished product pretty much. Just ship it as is.

If a PM needs NotepadAI for their career progression then start it from scratch.

Shouldn’t the AI technology that Microsoft is spending billions on make this trivial?

Microsoft has the resources to train people.

The previous version would have been written in C rather than C++ since as someone else has said it's a very basic Windows application, more of a wrapper around the edit control than anything more complicated.

These days it would have to be written in some other language that has those Windows Runtime bindings available for it. So could be C++ but if I were to guess I'd say it's written in Typescript and compiled to a native or .Net binary.

> That means you have to work on the original code, and modern entry-mid level devs can't do that. It's probably in C++.

As far as I remember, Notepad was the reference implementation for a Microsoft widget. Nothing more. If "modern entry-mid level devs can't do that" you really have a much bigger problem.

I don’t think you understand. Notepad was literally one of the examples that comes with the SDK. It doesn’t need any maintenance. As long as windows has a native SDK, notepad exists because it is basically the simplest GUI application, provided as a sample.