@klardotsh One language that may actually be a more natural fit for building a shell is actually TCL (especially about the string quoting thing). I remember trying out JimTCL and jimsh a while back: https://jim.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/www/www/index.html

The project was started by Antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo, probably one of the few great programming minds my country contributed to the world), of linenoise and redis fame, and the shell does come with linenoise obviously for line editing.