Explain what it means to create immutable classes and their advantages in development.

Creating immutable classes means that once an object is created, its state cannot be changed. All class fields are declared as final and initialized through the constructor, and setters are absent.

Advantages:

• Thread safety: objects can be freely used in a multithreaded environment without synchronization.
• Ease of understanding: the object's state is fixed, which simplifies debugging and testing.
• Security: prevents accidental or unwanted data modifications.

Example of an immutable class in Java:

public final class Person {
    private final String name;
    private final int age;

    public Person(String name, int age) {
        this.name = name;
        this.age = age;
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public int getAge() {
        return age;
    }
}