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: 
Perl 6 is evolving slowly but steadily. Larry Wall wrote a Parser that can parse all Perl 6 that we know of (which is basically the test suite plus a bit of other code). Rakudo, which is Perl 6 on Parrot, also performs nicely. You can track its progress in the test suite with the charts on [rakudo.de](http://rakudo.de/)

Note that it's a radically new language, and not trivial to implement. I don't expect a usable version before next year, and even then it will take quite some time for any implementation to become as mature as Perl 5 is today (which has had 20 years to develop a stable code base).
I feel like some good things may come from Perl 6 (e.g. parrot), but I'm not counting on ever doing anything with the language.

In the bioinformatics development group where I work, we're encouraging use of Python for new development where Perl would have been the language of choice in the past. Python appears to provide a better path forward for us.