These are almost exactly my own reasons, except I have #5 - annotations as needed for some php frameworks, and especially for ide intellisense. E.g. if the ide

These are almost exactly my own reasons, except I have #5 - annotations as needed for some php frameworks, and especially for ide intellisense. E.g. if the ide can't grok what a $var is you can do : /** @var Some\Namespace\To\Class $var */ $var = ... then when it reindexes things it has no problem tying everything together.