[chvid]

The point of getters and setters (rather than having public fields) have always been to control how an object's users access the internals of the object and how state is changed if at all. The idea that you should write them as a ritual or a boilerplate is just bananas.

In this discussion of major programming paradigms it is important to realise a couple of things: That this is very old discussion and that there are no clear winner. The productivity and usefulness of a language is ultimately shown when it is put to the test of big practical development projects. Currently business is dominated by the object-orientated languages (C#, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, C++ etc.) and probably for good reason: The dominant problems that software spends its line count on seems to be things like user interface and interface to other "platforms/paradigms" such as relational databases, web services or data files. Object-orientation have arguably shown itself to solve these problems well.