And? So did PHP 5.x. So do all languages. That's what I mentioned with "baby steps".
You can run PHP3, PHP4 and PHP5 projects with little or no change at all, code dating back to 1990s with PHP7. If you cared a bit and adjusted your code over the years, most changes are announced many versions ago and got deprecated. E.g the original MySQL API had been deprecated for a decade or so years, and only got removed with v7, yet it's easy to update the code to the newer APIs, as it was possible since early 2000s, when the newer API got introduced and stayed unchanged since then. And you could use a shim too.
PHP and Java (and several other languages) have really kept an eye on backwards compatibility, you cannot deny that or paint it in another light.
I was responding to "keeping it backward-compatible", which it did not do. In any case, Python 3 is not exactly a brand new language, many codebases can be adjusted to run on both engines without much effort. I don't think the difference is as stark as you've painted it.
You can run PHP3, PHP4 and PHP5 projects with little or no change at all, code dating back to 1990s with PHP7. If you cared a bit and adjusted your code over the years, most changes are announced many versions ago and got deprecated. E.g the original MySQL API had been deprecated for a decade or so years, and only got removed with v7, yet it's easy to update the code to the newer APIs, as it was possible since early 2000s, when the newer API got introduced and stayed unchanged since then. And you could use a shim too.
PHP and Java (and several other languages) have really kept an eye on backwards compatibility, you cannot deny that or paint it in another light.