I think I was under the impression that Haxe was just an alternative Flash/AS3 runtime, but it appears that it is actually far more than that? Either than, or the association with Flash is obviously less important these days?
EDIT: I think that impression came from reading this [1] article, possibly found here... or possibly some other article... anyway it talked extensively about AS3 and made comparisons against Haxe.
There is a history article [1], but essentially, the founding developer made the MTASC AS2 compiler back in the day before making Haxe, and the SWF target (AVM bytecode) was the first target Haxe supported. To this day it remains popular with the 2D games market (ex-flash). The OpenFL [2] framework promises (with mild success) to give you the Flash API with the Haxe language on native targets. So flash still is part of the Haxe community, though less and less it involves the actual Flash Player runtime.
Personally I do web development in Haxe, using Neko or NodeJS on the server, and JS on the client. I've toyed with the Java and C++ targets, but so far haven't had a single project which compiled to Flash. I find the language on it's own has a lot of features that are appealing outside of the flash environment.
Yes, Nicolas Cannasse is still involved. He helped keep the server alive last night ;)
These days he is no longer the #1 contributor [1], but he maintains the "benevolent dictator for life" role and certainly still commits plenty of great code.
EDIT: I think that impression came from reading this [1] article, possibly found here... or possibly some other article... anyway it talked extensively about AS3 and made comparisons against Haxe.
1 - http://www.grantmathews.com/43