I've only read the first couple paragraphs so far but the idea reminds me of a shareware language I tinkered with years ago in my youth, though I never wrote anything of substance: Euphoria (though nowadays it looks like there's an OpenEuphoria). It had only two fundamental types. (1) The atom: a possibly floating point number, and (2) the sequence: a list of zero or more atoms and sequences. Strings in particular are just sequences of codepoint atoms.
It had a notion of "type"s which were functions that returned a boolean 1 only if given a valid value for the type being defined. I presume it used byte packing and copy-on-write or whatever for its speed boasts.