The original Smalltalk-72 focused on teaching children, but for Smalltalk-76 Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls wanted different things. Alan wanted to continue the kid focus while Dan argued that a language focused on advanced programmers could be used to implement a children's language on top of it. He was proven right decades later when EToys and then Scratch were implemented on top of Squeak Smalltalk, which closely followed Smalltalk-76.

This confusion frustrated me when I first read about Smalltalk in the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine. I couldn't figure it out and at that point I had learned several programming languages and none of them took me more than two hours to become reasonably fluent in. So I was having problems with a language that kids were using?!? Later on I found out about the differences between Smalltalk-72 and -80 and that the Byte articles explained things that made sense if you already knew them but didn't help you learn in the first place. All variations of Smalltalk have become my favorite way to program ever since.