Many of the OPs complains have the tone of "not my PHP!!!".
If old PHP devs learn to look for annotations, points 2 and 4 no longer apply, and many points in 1 no longer apply either.
It sounds more like a PHP dev grumbling about change... (what else is new)
Re:PHP Annotations Are a Horrible Idea
by theunraveler on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @09:14AM
(#4664225)
I am not opposed to change--in fact, I welcome it, especially with regard to PHP. Rather, I'm criticizing the use of annotations based on the argument that it is bad application design.
Re:PHP Annotations Are a Horrible Idea
by astrodust on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @01:43PM
(#4665620)
Making comments become as important as live code is never a good idea. This practice also encourages arbitrary syntax and would eventually lead to a mess of different standards with no cohesion.
Having a proper `pragma` declaration would be ideal.
> First of all PHP isn't about elegance...PHP is about getting stuff done.
What language isn't about getting stuff done?
> He doesn't offer one good valid technical reason why not to use comments...
Not true. The OP explicitly points out that it breaks many PHP debugging capabilities.
> The fact that you can even parse out comments with the reflection API lends, to me, that meta-programming is a-ok.
So what? PHP also has a goto function. Should we use it just because we can?
> I'll take the first one because I have other shit I need to do.
Just because it's less verbose doesn't mean it's better. Otherwise, everyone would use Coffeescript instead of JS.