So, Lingo is the programming language for Director / Shockwave. Most LLMs know very little about it, since its been MIA for a while, however, there's a niche community of people reverse engineering games and the entire Shockwave runtime for years now, and LLMs are accelerating these efforts.

In fact, because of these niche Shockwave communities, and they've admitted to it, the Habbo Origins client was able to be made. That effort was spearheaded by a player who reverse engineered their backend for years, and eventually built up a decompiler for Shockwave, and made their own game client run as a stand-alone EXE (Projector Mode for Shockwave iirc) which is what Origins did.

More recently, a project named "Shockless" emerged that took the Shockwave client for Habbo Origins, and rebuilt it in JS w/ PixiJS (I think?) in order to be a more special-purpose Shockwave runtime. Some months later (this month I think), Sulake released Keystone a new Origins client, essentially doing the same thing, itself coded in C++ but it looks like it took a very closely similar approach. Really fascinating seeing LLMs push reverse engineering communities forward to help preserve old tech and games, and in some cases, niche games forward from the grave.

I think the frontier LLMs have finally gotten to the point they can sort of pick up the syntax on the fly.

I made my own .NET based language using Opus 4.6 and it knew how to write code for it, since the rules were in the context window. I havent gone back to that project, since I've been trying to build other more ambitious projects, but its impressive how much LLMs can pull off as of early this year.

It is funny to me they mention Visual Basic, I've been on and off experimenting with rebuilding the VB6 IDE and eventually its compiler with a modern runtime using Claude, I've got a good chunk of the IDE, and I can load forms, I can even call VB6.exe to compile if you have it installed, but I had to pause since my old college copy of VB6 is kinda busted (I misconfigured something somewhere and it keeps crashing when I open a project).