[asocial]

>Apparently PHP is now verbose enough that people feel the need to write code templates for it

It isn't though. PHP is many things but overly verbose isn't one of them * . Although there does seem to be a drive by some developers to make PHP look and act as much like Java as possible. Maybe this comes from discomfort at PHP not being structured or strict enough out of the box for their liking. If you've only ever dealt with well-engineered languages which have a certain, coherent set of patterns and paradigms baked in, and which demand you write your code a certain way, and you approach PHP, you're going to have a problem.

I don't know why a tool like this would be useful, but it wouldn't be because of the language. PHP exposes its own token parser - you can generate PHP code with much less abstraction than this.

*classes like IteratorIterator aside...