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One of the main differences with different PHP versions is that python 3 is not backwards compatible. Also, even after all these years, there are still quite some python projects that don't support python 3 (examples: mysqldb/twisted). Just switching the interpreter from 2 to 3 is surely something that will give a lot of headaches.

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No, PHP minor versions are not necessarily compatible with each other. When I worked in web hosting, we had to deal with quite a few issues resulting from changes between 5.2 and 5.3, and later 5.3 and 5.4.

At least Python has a sane versioning scheme, where breaking compatibility increments the major version number or is a bug.

I think the OP's point was that python 3 was never intended to be backwards compatible and intentionally broke compatibility in several places. For this reason, 2.7 continued to be supported for quite some time. I don't know a lot about PHP, but I'm guessing this was not the case for their minor version updates.

PHP changes were mostly, but not completely backwards compatible. There were a few corner cases were you'd get problems, but the majority of code would run fine on both systems.

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