The joy of Flash was the ease of scripting alongside vector-based illustration with keyframe animations and audio (plus intuitive asset management, onion skinning etc. etc.). Flash was downright fun indeed!

Yeah, P5 and Processing are cool, I like them, but the part of Flash was so magical was that I sort of discovered the coding part.

I pirated a copy of Flash so I could draw dumb animations, I would then convert looping animations into movie clips, and then I sort of accidentally figured out that you can attach code to those movie clips, and then I figured out how to make basic games. None of my games were that impressive, but it was ridiculously fun for me.

I like P5, I've played with it, but the integration with the animation tool is what really made me love Flash. I miss it.

While these libraries are great, doing anything with them requires writing code. Hypercard was like PowerPoint, with a point and click GUI.

Check out Downpour - probably the closest modern thing to HyperCard to make fun clicky apps and games.

https://downpour.games/

But as I understand it, to make it actually do anything interesting you still had to write Hyperscript (wasn't it?) code.

You could set up simple interactions entirely via the GUI, like making buttons navigate to other cards.

HyperCard also came with an extensive set of stacks that contained premade buttons and fields with useful scripts, and you could copy and paste those objects into your own stacks or modify entire "template" stacks into customized applications without necessarily even looking at the scripts.

The general idea was to provide users with a smooth ramp: no code -> using someone else's code -> tweaking someone else's code -> writing your own code.