>My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax. Yikes. Stuff that's in comments SHOULD NOT AFFECT RUNNING CODE. Who came up with that?

Agree. The first time I ran into this, I was completely confused as to why my code wasn't running as expected. Then I noticed the strange formal structure of the comments, made changes there, and voila.

I don't understand why that feature wasn't implemented as decorators or some kind of function code. If anyone has any resources/thoughts on why this path was chosen, I would be interested in seeing them.