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.
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.
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)