Even worse for Ghanaian Universities where I come from, You could boldly say 99% of CS/CE students never get to implement an operating system or programming language even though they spend 4 years doing CS/CE and you would be right.
Exactly, in my case I got into programming through interest and started teaching myself how to build web apps in python/django and continued pursuing my interest in learning a bunch of other interesting things.
"but falls short when they want to do anything more complex." yes right! and for situations like this doing hard projects goes a long way to make you a better engineer. You don't get to do them because you weren't taught in University or in bootcamps - How many bootcamps will even teach things like that?
No!
1. Not everyone has a CS degree, including yours truly.
2. I chose not to attend University to do CS to pursue my curiosities/interest.
3. I am a Ghanaian and even if I had attended University I would not have done a programming language implementation or have written my own OS. The Universities in Ghana do not have that as part of their curriculums, although they do cover them at the surface level.
4. Because of #2 I was able to write a toy OS and now doing this Programming Language project.
Even though llama is dynamic at the moment, I am looking at adding static typing later.