[majewsky]

Exactly. I've seen my fair share of

  /**
   * Gets the thing for the ID.
   *
   * @param id the ID of the thing
   * @return the thing
   */
  Thing* getThing(int id) {
    return things[id];
  }

[stewbrew]

It seems to be a dynamically typed language. So they require developers to put type annotations into comments so that the compiler cannot make use of them. Oh well.