In a recent post to the ThinkPHP blog Martin Brotzeller looks at a PHP operator that developers should just not use anymore - the suppression operator (@).

The silence operator exists to give programmers an easy way to suppress messages when a command might fail and the code checks for success itself (i.e. in those cases that raise errors instead of throwing exceptions).

He points out a popular use (like putting it on an fopen to prevent it from throwing an E_WARNING) but notes that this could cause trouble if the code is several layers deep and seems to fail silently. He gives en example of the Zend_Loader component of the Zend Framework and how, if the suppression operator was used, errors with an include failed without so much as a blip in the error log. While it seems handy, the suppression operator can cause more harm than good in the long run.