Federico compares two languages in this new post to the PHP::Impact blog today - PHP and Python - in their need for "getters" and "setters".

Python code doesn't typically use the get and set methods so common in PHP. Normally, when writing PHP code, you carefully protect your instance variables by making them private, so callers can only interact with them via getter and setter methods. [...] Python's solution to this problem is more readable, it has a construct called a "property".

He compares two blocks of code that do the same thing - set properties on the object with the PHP side doing a bit more error checking (seemingly) than the Python side. They both apply a title property to a book object.