I've never experienced the same kind of out-of-the-box problems with PHP as I have Python. I seem to suffer constantly from python/python3, pip inconsistencies and stuff just breaking constantly.

Python build/package management tooling is a joke, but Python the language is very consistent and usable.

Ooh, now that's a good question.

Which is more important really? I genuinely don't know the answer to this.

I don't think it's an either/or; more like both language and tooling can eat into your annoyance budget and you look for the combination that has the lowest overall cost.

With Python one never knows when a particular feature code depends on will be removed. With PHP code written 15 years ago still works.

> With PHP code written 15 years ago still works.

If you never upgrade, sure. PHP 7 and each minor version in it have deprecated and removed plenty of stuff that was legal in 5.6. PHP 8 is on track to do more of the same. I think the backwards incompatible changes are pretty much all good for the language, but claiming backwards compatibility in PHP is completely wrong.

If you aren't on PHP 8, you aren't supported, and if you're on anything earlier than 7.4, you aren't getting security releases. And the new versions released yearly all have breaking changes, and get three years of security support. It's not 2015 anymore.

What features have been removed from Python?

Besides the obvious 2 to 3 transition, cpython has obsoleted or renamed stdlib modules several times between 3.x versions. For example, the collections.abc change causes several common Linux bits to break if you change the system default to 3.8.

Which is a double edged sword. How many ways can one escape a string, and for how many of them will you find a stack overflow comment from a decade ago saying are the secure option to use?