Based on the experience I've had with teaching programmers, most don't have the distinction clearly in their mental models. For most of basic things they might

Based on the experience I've had with teaching programmers, most don't have the distinction clearly in their mental models. For most of basic things they might do it can be made to work either way: usually with a bit of fiddling they can make it work. Of course, this doesn't work at all as soon as you start trying to implement data structures. I've seen some awkward code too from people moving from Java to C++ where either they make everything a pointer, or they use value objects without understanding that they're not references.