Also found very cool meet me in the middle type projects, where you can interact with Shell in different programming languages, or "transpile" to it like CoffeeScript -> Javascript.

The most interesting so far: Sh.py [0] (mentioned here before [1]) and plumbum [2], which is surprisingly extensive.

[0] http://amoffat.github.io/sh/

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531645

[2] https://github.com/tomerfiliba/plumbum