The smartest ones are the ones they are most threatened by.

Is this really that common? Even yesterday I was talking to some friends about this, are people really more agressive towards "smarter" people just because they feel threatened?

I try to be the most open I can and learn the most from people that I feel are smarter than me. But it seems that it is not the norm, even with "non-tech" people.

It wasn't really C vs perl, the languages have pretty different use-cases. Rather it was that he used awk, and said he considered perl "an unreadable write-only language". That was only half the issue though, he was also widely respected as an old school unix hacker. Like virtually all of the old school guys he preferred using BSDs, and slashdot was a linux noob circle jerk at the time (it may be still, I haven't been there in years). The combination of those two things led to a lot of really bad comments that demonstrated just how terrible the slashdot community really was.