My feeling is that code is not meta data, rather it is a work of art in some respects. Whilst a compiler doesn't see it that way (code is code) a human, on the other hand, demands presentability, readability, maintainability. A human has to diff the code, has to have comments, and has to abide by coding conventions in a work place in order to make collaboration on a project easier. These things are not meta in any way!

A programmer's canvas is plain old text. Usually monospace. The difference is that a word processor has a different canvas - that canvas has multiple fonts, proportional spacing, and tab stops that align paragraphs.

By realising that the programmer's canvas and the word processing canvas are two different things we can come to realise that the tab character (\t) is prone to creating more problems than it solves for programmers who are attempting to paint on a canvas that alters shape between user experiences whenever a tab character is involved.