Some of the biggest early Haxe users like Tivo were explicitly looking for a vehicle to transition off of Flash. That part of it definitely makes sense.
But more generally it is incapable of the kind of end-user tooling that attracts early adopters. This is because it targets everything, and so really using it means knowing the platform you target and being able to debug at both levels - it does what you would expect a best-effort compiler to do, but it does not try to magically cover up what's going on. You can be put at sea pretty quickly if things break several layers down.
And that makes Haxe a great technology and a less great product. When it's paired with a framework like OpenFL it seems to get a lot of interest though. I see it as a long-term "survivor language" since its premise is still valid - it will be able to keep hanging on, gradually accumulating more of a basis for itself.
But more generally it is incapable of the kind of end-user tooling that attracts early adopters. This is because it targets everything, and so really using it means knowing the platform you target and being able to debug at both levels - it does what you would expect a best-effort compiler to do, but it does not try to magically cover up what's going on. You can be put at sea pretty quickly if things break several layers down.
And that makes Haxe a great technology and a less great product. When it's paired with a framework like OpenFL it seems to get a lot of interest though. I see it as a long-term "survivor language" since its premise is still valid - it will be able to keep hanging on, gradually accumulating more of a basis for itself.