[mhh__]

It forces you to write "good" code.

I think it's Python's only real strength. The language is ugly, the interpreter is a genuinely deficient way of making software ("Why use a compiler when you can just write thousands of unit tests to check for syntax errors!?"), and the mechanisms for abstraction are fairly weak - even after all that, n00b Python code is fairly readable.

[aitchnyu]

Nowadays tooling will enforce this "goodness" for most languages. Whitespace blocks were a pain when people mixed tabs and spaces.