[virmundi]

So I think a fair question at this point is how often does that happen? To further inquire, how often does that happen in contexts that you don't control?

I'm sure that library/framework people need to worry about that. Most normal developers do not. For many cases Java objects like Article are just structs. They are static maps. Sure, in the example on the site there was a getTags that added some logic, but still, pretty much a struct.

Switching to either public accessor for mutable or immutable objects actually will stream line code. You might say that public mutators are bad; encapsulation and all that. For the most part little is actually gained in the majority of getter/setter code to necessitate their weight.

Heck, as per the JavaBean spec (a spec for making components to create drag and drop UIs by the way), you can't even have fluent APIs where the setter returns "this". It has to be void.

API stability has value. If you're a library, you probably want to do this just to be safe. But really for most imperative Java code it's just a lot of fluff for little value.