What do you think happens when you invoke a shell? It's not some magical primitive, it also does string parsing and all the other stuff that a scripting language requires. SSH also has to parse the line!

I did say Python-esque (I do get that Python in particular has a lot of stuff in its prelude). Really if you want to be super pedantic then the most "banana"-y isn't a line in your shell but some C library calls on both sides of the system.