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

One very practical reason for the continued practice of generating (I hope nobody writes them by hand nowadays) getters in Java programs, even for immutable "value" objects where, in my opinion, it is unnecessary overhead :

Many libraries and tools rely on the old JavaBeans conventions (or at least the getters and setters part of it).

These tools, that use reflection or other dynamic techniques to access field values via getters, cannot handle accessing simple public fields. JSP is an example that comes to my mind.

Also modern IDEs make it trivial to generate getters for one or many fields at a time, and also to change the name of the getter when the name of the field is changed.

So we just keep writing getters even for immutable objects.