Why continue to use getters with immutable objects?

Question

Using immutable objects has become more and more common, even when the program at hand is never meant to be ran in parallel. And yet we still use getters, which require 3 li

Answer 1

You can have public final fields (to imitate some kind of immutability) but it doesn't mean that referenced objects can't change their state. We still need defensive copy in some cases.

 public class Temp {
    public final List list;

    public Temp() {
        this.list = new ArrayList();
        this.list.add(42);
    }

   public static void foo() {
      Temp temp = new Temp();
      temp.list = null; // not valid
      temp.list.clear(); //perferctly fine, reference didn't change. 
    }
 }