I had a rather interesting response when offering an answer to this question:
The question has since been "protected" because it has "attracted low-quality answers."
I fail to see how my answer merits that.
I had a rather interesting response when offering an answer to this question:
The question has since been "protected" because it has "attracted low-quality answers."
I fail to see how my answer merits that.
When we (users with enough reputation) protect questions, the standard text talks about "low quality answers", and it's a frequent thing that is done with very old questions which are resurrected to the front page either due to a new answer (like yours in this case) or because the question was linked offsite.
These scenarios tend to lead to many low-rep users chiming in with answers that do not add much. Worse, very old questions often aren't seen by their askers, so they can't benefit from your answer (or select it as accepted).
This wasn't any slight against you - there was another more troublesome answer:
Protecting the question doesn't impact your (solid) answer at all.
One important bit to realize about the Stack Exchange format, is that it is Q&A. Questions and answers. Provocation and 'get[ing] people to think' is not what the Q&A format is geared to. Rather, the "you have this problem, this is the solution."
The Stack Exchange format is not that of a forum and has a number if differences. To that, I would suggest that you read On discussions and why they don't make good questions and its related reading section which goes more into that.
The python question was protected because another user posted a rather low quality answer on it that really didn't add anything. It has since been deleted. We have often found that when an old post that should be closed because it is too broad is bumped back up to the front page of activity, that other people will often post answers to it that are similarly low quality (yours was reasonable, but there are problems with the question that would entice other people to add their two bits).
Protecting the question prevents people who aren't familiar with the Q&A model from posting other responses as if this was a forum post, and also gives pause to higher rep users to remind them to post good answers.
The question meanders and covers a lot of ground (hence being closed as "too broad"). As best as I can tell, the question is:
I'd appreciate some tips on how to best approach this code conversion (C to Python), based on your experience.
Your answer starts off well enough talking about general approaches, then dives into memory allocation where it spends most of its space talking about GC, object caches, etc. which were not mentioned in the question as asked.
In other words, it appears that the question itself was poorly worded: you got sucked into answering what is essentially an unanswerable question unless you are writing a whole book on the topic.
I would not take this personally, the real problem is the question: your answer simply brought attention to it.