Not mentioned in the article, but good to know: Lil is the scripting language of Decker, which itself is a fantastic reincarnation of Hypercard with 1-bit graphics.
Fun fact: While Decker's UI is mostly black-and-white, it represents graphics in an 8-bit paletted fashion, with patterns as "logical colors"; this is very convenient for flood-fills, scaling, and other drawing operations. There is also a user-facing 16-color palette which can be accessed with drawing tools via the "Style -> Color" menu item.
This does gopher, and you can replace the netcat code on GAWK with connections, and the usage on writting against the socket would be pretty much the same but using AWKś printf instead of echo:
It may be of interest that the BBC’s style guide stipulates that for acronyms pronounced as a word (e.g., NASA - a bona fide acronym [1]) rather than spelled (e.g., BBC - an initialism, rather than an acronym), it should be printed in title case rather than all-caps.
https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/index.html