A combination of syntactically significant whitespace, and inconsistent use of tabs in source files, are two reasons why programmers often can't understand their own code.<p>I write a lot of Python and I think it's a terrific language, but its use of syntactically significant whitespace is most definitely not in the plus column.<p>The goal of significant whitespace is to save programming time and increase source readability. But the result is often the exact opposite.