I don't generally use getters/setters because the presence of them indicates that my class isn't doing enough to be alive.
When I do consider needing them I always create them, no matter whether or not the language supports mixing access wrt variables. Only time I'd consider not doing so is in languages like VB that support "properties" where a function can look just like a variable access. The key reason here is that I don't want clients bound to the fact that the property is implemented by a variable.
