I love the immutable "pattern" because of its strengths, and in the past I have found it beneficial to design systems with immutable data types (some, most or even all). Often when I do so, I find myself writing fewer bugs and debugging is much easier.
However, my peers in general shy away from immutable. They are not inexperienced at all (far from it), yet they write data objects the classic way - private members with a getter and a setter for every member. Then usually their constructors take no arguments, or maybe just take some arguments for convenience. So often, creating an object looks like this:
Foo a = new Foo();
a.setProperty1("asdf");
a.setProperty2("bcde");
Maybe they do that everywhere. Maybe they don't even define a constructor that takes those two strings, no matter how important they are. And maybe they don't change the value of those strings later and never need to. Clearly if those things are true, the object would be better designed as immutable, right? (constructor takes the two properties, no setters at all).
How do you decide if an object type should be designed as immutable? Is there a good set of criteria to judge it by?
I currently am debating whether to switch a few data types in my own project to immutable, but I would have to justify it to my peers, and the data in the types might (VERY rarely) change - at which time you can of course change it the immutable way (create a new one, copying the properties from the old object except for the ones that you want to change). But I'm not sure if this is just my love for immutables showing through, or if there is an actual need for/benefit from them.