What is the point of using a getter?

Question

I've just started learning Java, and am struggling to understand the (seemingly unnecessary) point of getters and setters.

I'm following a tutorial on Codecademy, and it has asked me to create the method getAge(). What is the point in creating a method to get the age, when I could just run the line I wrote and commented out below?

class Dog {
        int age;

        public Dog(int dogsAge) {
            age = dogsAge;
    }

    public void bark() {
    System.out.println("Woof!");
    }

    public void run(int feet){
      System.out.println("Your dog ran " + feet + " feet!");
        }

    public int getAge() {
      return age;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {

    Dog spike = new Dog(1);
    spike.bark();
    spike.run(100);
    int spikeAge = spike.getAge();
    System.out.println(spikeAge);

    //System.out.println(spike.age);

    }
}

It seems like it would save a few lines of code. I'm sure I'm probably missing the point of OOP somewhere though?

Similarly with the age variable, why do I need to declare the age type, then create a method setting the age equal to another age variable? Could I just use this.age = age? To save writing extra code?

The point is to reduce unnecessary connections, to reduce code complexity (cyclomatic complexity), and thereby reduce the chance of bugs. — Hovercraft Full Of Eels, Mar 14 '16 at 00:19
This may be trivial for small programs, but scales up quickly to a huge degree with mid to large programs. — Hovercraft Full Of Eels, Mar 14 '16 at 00:20
There is still a legit point to ask this questions. Sometimes people think just making fields private and providing getters and setters makes up good OO design. Very often, that is not true. — GhostCat, Mar 14 '16 at 00:24
@Jägermeister: but isn't most of that pretty well discussed in the duplicate question? And if it's well discussed, why re-hash it here? — Hovercraft Full Of Eels, Mar 14 '16 at 00:28

What is the point of using a getter?

0 Answers0