well that's the trick. If you look at implementing a Web browser or a physics engine you instantly give up, and you are right about it, it's just too hard. If instead you write a partial HTTP client which can display some text from a URL or have a 3D scene and in it an object Y coordinates get smaller each millisecond then suddenly in terms of the essence of each, you are 80% there really. Now if you want to implement the "rest" you might need an entire lifetime, or more. Still IMHO it's definitely worth doing very compact and limited versions of all those in order to learn, even if done only once in your life.
I used to implement these things professionally and to write an IP + TCP + HTTP is certainly less than a year with experience. would I ship that and expect people to use it without a lot of burnin? no..but to say that its a lifetime of work is off by at least a factor of 10.
well that's the trick. If you look at implementing a Web browser or a physics engine you instantly give up, and you are right about it, it's just too hard. If instead you write a partial HTTP client which can display some text from a URL or have a 3D scene and in it an object Y coordinates get smaller each millisecond then suddenly in terms of the essence of each, you are 80% there really. Now if you want to implement the "rest" you might need an entire lifetime, or more. Still IMHO it's definitely worth doing very compact and limited versions of all those in order to learn, even if done only once in your life.