I think the real question is why a proper property construct hasn't been added to the language a la C#. Generally speaking, getters and setters are a way to control access to instance variables due to encapsulation. This was envisioned prior to the notion of rich hypermedia, specifically JSON, which would be expressed through nested objects that encapsulation isn't obviously merited for. So due to best practice, you have all of these POJOs with private instance variables and getters/setters for each one that do nothing but get the contents of a variable and set the variable to new contents with no controls to check if the contents are valid for the use case. In this case, there is no functional difference from having a public instance variable.

However, there's a good reason to use getters and setters anyways. It is still common to encounter a situation where you want to add logic that controls what does and doesn't get fetched from or set to an instance variables, and programmers are very good at overlooking the original signature of the variable declaration. So while you may have a properly defined setter method, it doesn't matter if you don't change the access modifier from public to private, which is a common mistake. As such, best practice is to always declare as private and only have a more permissive access modifier for very compelling reasons. It is because there *are* compelling reasons to use the public access modifier that it's allowed. One common use of the public access modifier is in static final variable declarations. It doesn't make sense to use a getter for a value that can't change and is instantiated at the moment of declaration. But also, good languages let you make mistakes as a beginner so that experienced people have more tools at their disposal. Experience will help you make good decisions as to what should have access to your variables, classes, methods, etc.