But that was exactly my point. When you do it in Java, you are obviously doing something wrong (or at least not intended to be done). It just looks wrong at the first glance, with empty blocks and all. In PHP, it's just a single character prefix, no bother at all to add, and looks just like any other sigil. Its usage is definitely not discouraged by design, quite the contrary.
To get the same effect as @ you'd have to use try {} catch {} blocks all over the place and leave the catch blocks empty, as with any other language with runtime exceptions. Sadly this is done more that one would think...