It's little known that doccomments are a PHP language construct that can be reflected over just as Python's doc strings can be introspected with __doc__.
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.reflection.php#la...
Thus !Route GET, a/good/$programmer is just as much a language construct in a PHP program as @route('a/good/:programmer') is in a Python program. The key difference is Python defines at the language level how that particular bit of script is expanded as a decorator. Recess does its expansion of annotations at the framework level.
Python is a much better and more thoughtfully designed programming language than PHP, for sure. PHP has loop holes, doccomments is one of them. PHP does not do anything, by default, with a doccomment, but it does give an opportunity to introduce meta-data on classes, methods, and properties and easily reflect over that meta-data and then it's up to the programmer to define a 'DSL'.
In this sense PHP offers something powerful and dangerous. Recess choose a simple data format, such that parsing can be expressed in a regexp that is then processed by essentially 'Constructing a class of type [FirstWord] and call init method with array of [Following words as a PHP array] - finally make these annotations available through reflection'. Not too much different than annotations in Java/C#. Simple enough that the danger is mostly negated and the utility makes the 'hack' justifiable.
For a better-written justification of why this design decision was made for Recess: http://www.recessframework.org/page/on-hiding-our-dick-tracy...
(Aside: This is why I'm a huge fan of Scala - extending a language with the language is awesome.)