title: What are the advantages of "annotations" in Doctrine?
body: <p>I've been using Symfony for a while and I see that Doctrine, the preferred way to handle MySQL databases, makes use of <em>annotations</em> (see <a href="http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/latest/reference/annotations-reference.html" rel="nofollow">annotations reference</a>). My question is: why do the exist? I find them hard to read and to debug. What is the advantage of such a programming language?</p>