I don't think you can draw that conclusion either. At my university, the Electrical & Computer Engineering curriculum teaches freshman assembly language before

I don't think you can draw that conclusion either. At my university, the Electrical & Computer Engineering curriculum teaches freshman assembly language before C. All of the ECE students understand pointers immediately. The Computer Science curriculum teaches C++ (with raw pointers) before assembly language. Pointers are significant source of frustration for many students in CS.