PHP Annotations Are a Horrible Idea | The Unraveler.
I came along this technique when I built my first WordPress plugin. I couldn’t believe that a comment line would actually trigger a result in WordPress itself. I always get looked at in a strange way when introducing the concept to seasoned programmers wanting to know a bit about how WordPress does it’s thing. I’m not very familiar with Symfony or Doctrine but it seems like their implementations are even more extravagant than WordPress’ in that it actually triggers operational logic on the server (as opposed to acting like a flag of sorts in WordPress).