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: 
You should not forget that Perl 5 is being developed in parallel. [5.10](http://perlbuzz.com/2007/12/perl-510-now-available.html) was out not so long ago with new features and additions to the language.

Progress on Perl 6 is slow but steady, PUGS (Perl 6 over Haskell ) has been stalled for a while but Audrey might resume workingon it soon. In the mean while Rakudo (Perl 6 over parrot) is progressing well. Here is a post detailing [various implementations progress](http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-5-to-6/22-state.writeback)

Realistically I would not hold my breath for it but no matter how late it will be I think when it comes out it will still be relevant.
Perl 6 is moving along nicely. Perl 6 is a bit unlike previous Perl's in that Perl 6 is actually a language specification not an implementation of it. The reference implementation on top of Parrot that is the main thrust of the Perl 6 project has been renamed Rakudo and is moving along nicely. The best place I've found for news about it is <http://planetsix.perl.org/>. Currently, as far as I understand it, most of the important features of the language are implemented and they are fleshing out the rest and writing tests. You can download it and test it out a bit. The easiest way seems to be the cygwin version which has been bundled up and made into a cygwin package.