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Ah, Modula-2. I used that for my first paid programming job (Time Line project management, running on MS-DOS). Sadly, we had to abandon that for CPP in porting to Windows. Symantec even purchased a company that made a CPP development tool, and embarked on developing a cross-platform (Mac and Windows) SDK known as Bedrock. By the time the dust settled Microsoft Project (included with Office for site licenses, i.e. essentially free) wiped out our market share and Symantec closed the doors on the Project Management Group, the development tools group after that, is now Gen Digital (Norton LifeLock) with the enterprise product group now part of BroadCom.
As for Amazon's decision to do HWR in cloud rather than on device, I do not see that as political, but just reflecting the fact that they are leveraging AWS which is a core competency of theirs. Web services are very cookie cutter these days, and many people have the skills to work on them.
In this specific case the web service is not serving HTML/CSS or doing SQL queries to perform the task of converting notebook handwriting to text. Those things are not its job.
By contrast, they probably have very few people who know how to do development on Kindle.
It took better part of a year just to get Notebooks to be the minimally viable feature it should have been when it shipped.
I think most people with Scribes are just using them as big Kindles, and the basic Notebook features are fine as pen and paper replacement. There is no reason for Amazon to develop more advanced Notebook features.
So I think we will not be seeing any new Notebook features in the future (or many Kindle features more generally). Amazon appears content with the current state of Kindle platform, and it's more or less in keep the lights on mode. It seems the Alexa thing has cooled off too.
ReMarkable does on device conversion, but it is now almost 4 years since RM 2 shipped (Aug 2020). Evidently there is no market for similar devices that Amazon has any interest in capturing.
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