First of all, annotations are nothing new. They have been around in Java for years, and it was emulated because it had advantages that really don't need to be regurgitated by me. If they weren't a good idea, they wouldn't have lead to a formal adoption inside the language.
Secondly, in both Symfony2 and Doctrine2, annotations are an OPTION. You use them if you want to use them, and if you don't want to, you can use traditional configuration files. It doesn't seem that the author has done anything with either Symfony2 or Doctrine2, or he would have understood that. As someone who used Symfony1, ZF1, Propel and Doctrine, I would not go back to the old way of doing things, even if I was offered good money to do so (as happened just last week in fact).
Most people who actively use these components LOVE annotations, because they allow you to keep the configuration close to the code, and reduce verbosity.
They drive code generation, and reduce the amount of code that has to be written to get a specific job done. So if there's a problem debugging, is it really about annotations, or about code generation, and if we can't have code generation (facepalm) then I suppose we shouldn't have template systems like smarty or twig, simply because "debugging is harder" and editors have more work to do.
If it's not the author's cup of tea, nobody is forcing anyone to use these capabilities. Needless to say, I couldn't disagree with the premise of this article more. @jawngee already provided a simple salient example.
Secondly, in both Symfony2 and Doctrine2, annotations are an OPTION. You use them if you want to use them, and if you don't want to, you can use traditional configuration files. It doesn't seem that the author has done anything with either Symfony2 or Doctrine2, or he would have understood that. As someone who used Symfony1, ZF1, Propel and Doctrine, I would not go back to the old way of doing things, even if I was offered good money to do so (as happened just last week in fact).
Most people who actively use these components LOVE annotations, because they allow you to keep the configuration close to the code, and reduce verbosity.
They drive code generation, and reduce the amount of code that has to be written to get a specific job done. So if there's a problem debugging, is it really about annotations, or about code generation, and if we can't have code generation (facepalm) then I suppose we shouldn't have template systems like smarty or twig, simply because "debugging is harder" and editors have more work to do.
If it's not the author's cup of tea, nobody is forcing anyone to use these capabilities. Needless to say, I couldn't disagree with the premise of this article more. @jawngee already provided a simple salient example.