| I'm a PM and I ended up graduating with an econ BA instead of a CS degree, but I took a few intro CS classes at UCLA in...2011/2012. 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. |
C and C++ (and Assembly and compilers) are not part of the standard college software engineering curriculum here. Your opinion on that doesn't matter (just like mine doesn't matter) because it is a verifiable fact. And as such, it is also not strange to not see this bit of knowledge being prevalent. K&R isn't used much except if you are either taking the purely theoretical CS degree courses or if you tack them on to the normal required courses. Even the Gang of Four is only mentioned in passing when talking about patterns.
You __could__ argue if this is foundational knowledge, and if so, you __could__ argue that therefore the curriculum is in need of adjustment. But I didn't.
Regarding what this was all about (WrtCdEvrydy's comment), he might be talking out of the wrong hole, or he might be in a similar location as I am where this is how it works and that might be different from where you are.