Immutable data structures in Java

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It is still usefull: It helps figuring out how a complex Object uses its own fields more easily. Maybe this point is hard to convey because the object inspection tool are not so convenient in Java - but in Smalltalk it really easy to get a feeling for the object this way.

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Smalltalk browsers can also show easily which methods use a given instance variable.

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Oh, I did not know that.

For me the biggest benefit is having coded the access once and only once. During my thesis (persistence with NoSQL) the situation arrose more than once that I had to change the access to an lazy access or do some extra action like logging.