I wouldn't call it a generation "clash" so much as a "progression" from one generation to the next. As one who's been programming for a fair number of years, I certainly advocate knowing the details of what's going on at the lowest levels; if you're not familiar with how caches work, for example, you might have trouble figuring out why a loop over a 2-D array is running so slowly (answer: you have the loops inverted, so every array access is missing the cache). For those who have learned programming in more modern environments, I hope my column has been informative. But at the same time, if your target environment has the capability to take care of all the details for you, I see nothing wrong with taking advantage of that. If your PC can generate new kittens faster than STL kills them off, then by all means, blast those felines to bits. (: After all, that's the whole point of progression in computer technology -- to let the programmer focus more on the high-level problem and less on the low-level nuts and bolts.
Also, just in case it wasn't clear from the column, it was not at all my intent to criticize the original software. There are certainly things that I would have done differently, but in my own playthrough, the game ran nearly flawlessly in its target environment. Creating a complex piece of software like this is no small effort, and I have nothing but respect for Alec (Holowka, the developer) for completing his work to such a high caliber.