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Is PHPDoc now redundant?

James King on January 14, 2018

I've heard around the web that PHPDoc is now basically redundant thanks to the new features in PHP 7+ (return types etc.).

Should we still use it or is it truly pointless?

Opinions please :)

P.S: First post on dev.to!

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alephnaught2tog profile image
Max Cerrina

I mean, Java has had return types and all that good stuff for much longer than PHP--obviously--and Javadoc is still a thing, so....

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Weston Wedding

I'd say there's still a place. Type info only goes so far and PHPDoc is more than just type information!

I work with Drupal on occasion and deal with PHPDoc-driven documentation like api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21l...

I would not want to try to deal with the number of distinct classes it would take to express that same level of information. I'm not sure it's realistically possible.

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Tomasz Sawicki

I would gladly welcome a PHPDoc flavour (or IDE configuration option) where you don't have to provide parameters or return value types. Unfortunately sometimes you have to provide it when you want to document type of array values.

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Aleksi Kauppila

Still useful for declaring thrown exceptions.

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Joshua Johnson

No PHPDoc is still relevant. Documentation is key to the best code ever written. PHPDocs provide you with another level of documentation that is useful in source code.