In 12 months there wouldn't be a need for NX, since everyone would have the new assignment. I think you're dreaming here, Mark. More likely, in 12 months "NX" will also refer to some even newer assignments, and then we'll
really be confused.
I haven't had a time where the specific assignment made a difference. Differences are usually fairly minor, but they pop up in odd places. It even seems that there's more than one version of Contractor, with very slight differences in terms of names of methods or exceptions that may be thrown be a given method. Check out
this thread for some examples. It's hard to tell how significant these are - e.g. careful study of my own requirements indicates that the whole concept of "DuplicateKeyException" is quite useless, and though I'm required to declare a class of that name and declare my create method as "throws DuplicateKeyException" there's no sane reason to actually ever throw such an exception. However it's possible that some other versions of the assignment are worded in such a way that it actually could (and perhaps should) be used - so I'm a bit leery about telling other people not to use it, even though I have no doubt about the answer for my own assignment. I wonder if these little differences are the result of minor tweaking of the assignment to make it "better", or if they're intentionally trying to foil collaborators by giving them assignments that
look the same but are actually quite different in some respects. It's given me a certain paranoia as I think about it.
