Intro to Programming 1 and 2 were taught in C++. Can't remember which one taught pass by reference, but it was definitely in one of those two.
Third class I took was Intro to Systems or something like that. The whole class was C and x86 ASM. Lots of binary operations in that one, used K&R a fair amount in that class (also learned debugging assembly in GDB and some other "low-level"-ish stuff).
Just looked it up, can't say 100% it's still C++, but the syllabus looks about the same as I remember for both class. It gets to pointers by week 7, and then in the second class goes deeper:
* https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring22/cs31/syllabus.html#...
* https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring22/cs32/syllabus.html#...
And again, I didn't even get a CS degree. This was all lower-div CS work at a public university, and I'm not even a career engineer.
> So no, not knowing the difference between passing references or values, or pointers and dereferencing them is not as strange as you seem to think it is. It is not a piece of knowledge or experience that is seen as valuable enough by the people that create the curriculum or the companies that employ the largest quantities of inexperienced workers in this part of the world.
This attitude is why you're getting flak in this thread. Your claim that "We don't teach pass by reference these days" was too absolute, and not accurate for a ton of people. Then someone came back and told you that, and you told them that their claim was too absolute.
I'll also say that it's something that was absolutely valued around the orgs I worked in at Microsoft (Azure, DevDiv, Windows, very roughly bottom half of the stack teams). If not C/C++ pointers, than __absolutely__ passing by reference in C#.
Point being: __knowing__ about pointers, passing by ref vs. value, etc. is not as strange as __you__ seem to think it is.
