I have been programming in python and java for quite a number of years and one thing i find myself doing is using the setters and getters from java in python but a number of blogs seem to think using the dot notation for access is the pythonic way. What I would like to know is if using dot to access methods does not violate abstraction principle. If for example I implement an attribute as a single object and use dot notation to access, if I wanted to change the code later so that the attribute is represented by a list of objects, that would require quite some heavy lifting which violates abstraction principle.