Question: Is there any visible progress? Is it now just an academic exercise? Do you believe Perl will continue to evolve with or without Perl 6 or will soon be forgotten?

Answer: 
The ability to target other languages to the parrot vm, will make it trivial to make a product using what ever languages you are comfortable with.

List of languages with recent activity, or at least tested with latest parrot (as of 2008/09/22):

*taken from [languages/LANGUAGES\_STATUS.pod](http://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk/languages/LANGUAGES_STATUS.pod)*

* APL
* bf
* Cardinal (Ruby)
* Chitchat (Smalltalk)
* [Cola](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola_programming_language) (Java)
* Common Lisp
* Eclectus (Scheme)
* ECMAScript
* [HQ9+](http://www.cliff.biffle.org/esoterica/hq9plus.html)
* [Jako](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jako_(programming)) (C/Perl)
* JSON
* [lazy-k](http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/lazy-k.html)
* [lolcode](http://lolcode.com/specs/1.2)
* [Lua](http://www.parrotcode.org/talks/LuaOnParrot.pdf)
* Parrot m4
* [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown)
* NQP (Not Quite Perl)
* [Rakudo](http://rakudo.org)
* Pheme (Lisp-2 compiler inspired by Scheme)
* Pipp (Pipp is Parrot's PHP)
* [PJS](http://users.fulladsl.be/spb1622/pjs/) ([wiki](http://www.perlfoundation.org/parrot/index.cgi?javascript))
* Punie (Perl1)
* regex
* Squaak (Squaak is not Squeak)
* partcl (TCL)
* [unlambda](http://www.madore.org/~david/programs/unlambda/)
* WMLScript Translator
Slow and late. It has a terminal case of second system disease. When I was a Perl hacker (back in the day), they had been working on Perl 6 for two years. That was 6 years ago. You could build a whole operating system in that time.