You would think there would be more effort supporting this since it's so tedious to have a billion libraries that are just wrappers around http apis and external utility calls.
Next Generation Shell is a "real" programming language. It also has syntax for calling external programs. It handles exit codes properly. It has facility for constructing command line arguments.
Project - https://github.com/ngs-lang/ngs
Motivation related to the above - https://ilya-sher.org/2017/10/10/why-i-have-no-favorite-prog...
edit: ah, yes, NGS also supports command line arguments automatic parsing when main() is called; augmenting this facility would be the sane way to solve the problem.
Most shell utilities are focused on text processing or are thin wrappers around system calls. If you're using something like python's `subprocess` module to get at these, you're doing it wrong.
Interactivity is where shells have an advantage. Their syntax lends itself well to that. It's also why the syntax sucks for regular programming.