Are you a js engineer? It's hard to imagine someone could write c, c++, java, python < 3, or probably c# without cleanly understanding the modulus operator, because
System.out.println("" + 3/4);
(or the moral equivalent) prints 0 in all the above languages. Every developer gets bit by integers performing integer division.
Uhhh, the mod operator is not the solution to that problem though.
In reality you'd only use a mod operator if you were doing things like sorting into 4 columns or doing an operation on every 3rd thing. And it's not a concept that is introduced at school. Now I try to think of it, I think I only picked up mod when I was learning rounding in my first language and the man page happened to mention modulus at the same time.
The mod operator isn't the solution to that problem, but that problem shoves integer division in your face. If a dev sees that and isn't curious enough to understand there is a division operator and a remainder operator, just like when you studied fractions in 3rd grade, I don't know that I want to work with that person.
And every dev should have hit the remainder operator at bare minimum when they had a long running loop and wanted to print a status every kth operation, eg
for(int i=0; i < 100000000; i++){
// some operation
if(i % 100000 == 0)
printf("** operating on count %d\n", i);
}
or when processing a big file, printing every k lines; or when running a slow operation, printing every k seconds; or ...
No, because for most of those problems there's an easy alternative, declare another counter variable and you can just go:
z++;
if(z>100000) {
print x;
z=0;
}
When I was taught maths there was no emphasis on remainders and it certainly wasn't denoted with a % sign. I vaguely remember writing something like 12r3 in primary school. The r meaning remainder.
While I learned about the modulus operator at a young age, I grew up programming in environments where "nobody" used floats because the CPU's in question didn't have FPUs, and floating point operations resulted in costly library calls.
While only "older" (I'm 39) developers will be likely to have been in that situation, it took another decade after I moved onto hardware with FPU's before I worked on anything where we actually used floating point math.
Instead we'd be working with fixed point stored in integer. E.g. for financial systems, floating point is a nightmare. Working with fixed point to whatever number of decimal points our accounting department wanted (5-6 typically) for tax calculations and the like was preferred.
So there are large number of areas where people can have worked successfully for many years without ever using floating point.
I mean, I know about the mod operator because I did Projrct Euler problems in middle school, but if I hadn't, nothing I've done since would have made me learn it. The extent of the math I've had to do was tracking send buffers in C, which was just addition and less than/equal to.
