Getters and Setters: a people problem

Greetings ladies and gentleman, it is I, El MoffDo, here to escort you on this excursion into Programming Excellence for the next 1300 words on this, the EIP web-ring.

For no particular reason, I was perusing a Smalltalk tutorial and duly noted this:

Class Date defines an instance method named “year” that answers the value of the instance variable named “year” in the instance of Date to which the message “year” is sent.

So this was Smalltalk, the revered and noble language that really made me “get” what objects were all about, tacitly sanctioning a getter. Narrowing my Google search down, I was able to find an entire page dedicated to the topic.