Other languages (e.g. Python, C#, Kotlin, even old-school Visual Basic) have actual language support for getters/setters, usually called properties. What makes

Other languages (e.g. Python, C#, Kotlin, even old-school Visual Basic) have actual language support for getters/setters, usually called properties. What makes Java different is that they have properties as a concept (in the Java beans specification) but not as an actual language feature, so you have to implement them manually yourself for every field and every class. (Or let the IDE generate the code, but all that boilerplate is code that wouldn't need to exist in other languages.)