Long ago, before the rise of the machines, I mean the IDEs, I did some tests on hand-written accessors in a large application and found about a 1/2 percent error rate. So one in every 200 accessors either set or got the wrong value! The application 'worked' at the time so these accessors were probably not used, but who knows? Nowadays most Java devs know to use their IDE to generate such things. But the question is: should they?
Here's a long list of articles that challenge the accepted wisdom:
- https://www.javaworld.com/article/2073723/core-java/why-getter-and-setter-methods-are-evil.html (2003!)
- https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AccessorsAreEvil
- https://typicalprogrammer.com/doing-it-wrong-getters-and-setters/ (2008)
- https://www.yegor256.com/2014/09/16/getters-and-setters-are-evil.html (2014)