I've just spent 1h at work (silly me) reading your blog, it is illuminating! I love your writing style, and I can't wait to see the your shell in action! Just the full-parse-before-execution is well worth it, especially when deploying scripts on servers.
If you open source the project, I'd love to try giving you a hand. Anyway, good luck with the project!
I'm rounding the corner on parsing hundreds of thousands of lines of bash scripts now... the prototype is in Python as mentioned in the first post, and the executor isn't complete, but if you want the parse-before-execution, that is working well.
ShellCheck does exist though. IIRC I had mixed experience with it -- it did actually find one bug, but on the other hand it spewed hundreds of warnings about double quoting vars, which is technically true, but not the best use of time for most scripts I write. I'd rather just get rid of stupid quoting rules, which is one of the #1 priorities.
(As far as writing, I find that "omit needless words" from Strunk & White goes a long way. Words like "very" and "a little" somehow spray themselves all over my writing; they are rarely useful and I kill them on editing passes :) )
If you open source the project, I'd love to try giving you a hand. Anyway, good luck with the project!