I wish they'd make a serious attempt to do this in python, it'd be do fun to hack up all my programs without having to know C, C++, and every other programming language under the sun. Then again maybe I'm just lazy
With rather few exceptions, you only need to learn C if hacking on your userland is your idea of fun. Check out Busybox for a particularly easy one to start hacking.
Well, there is PyCoreutils [1] for the userspace and supervisord [2] for pid 1. This is certainly an interesting idea - too bad the world isn't in dire need for more distributions.