[jghn]

The more modern take is to not bother with getters & setters for most things. People were cargo-cutting getters/setters on every variable without thinking about the implications.

First off, there's the question of if most things should even *allow* updates or just be immutable.

Second, what's the discernable difference between `public final int foo` and `private final foo` w/ `public int getFoo()`. Nothing really. The claim was always "but what if you want to update `foo` to be something more complex? The pain that these advocates always suggested never really wound up being much of a real world problem.

[leapingdog]

Anything relying on beans for (de)serialization via reflection (XML; JSON) were the big incentive in the J2EE space if I recall correctly.

[jghn]

Yes. And I believe it kept going with Spring.

But those were mistakes imposed by frameworks. Not a necessity for good language usage.