in reply to simpliest way to add "language" to my app

A simple but powerful language is the Unix shell itself. See The Unix Shell as a 4GL for details.

Each of the "commands" you list above can be a shell script. To iterate over hosts:

for HOST in waterloo.ca king.com lola.edu do show_status $HOST done

Carter's compass: I know I'm on the right track when by deleting something, I'm adding functionality.