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: 
Please see the Official Perl 6 Wiki to find the latest information:

<http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6>

The latest headlines from 2 leading Perl 6 blogs are shown at the bottom of the official Perl 6 wiki home page.

There's lots of other useful information and links there.

For example, recent Perl 6 articles and presentations:

<http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_articles_and_presentations>

The Parrot VM for dynamic languages (to be used by Rakudo/Perl 6) also has an official wiki:

<http://www.perlfoundation.org/parrot/index.cgi?parrot>

Parrot is multi-lingual, so Perl 6 will be able to call modules written in other Parrot languages, and other Parrot languages will be able to call Perl 6 modules compiled to Parrot.

Unlike Perl 5, which is defined by its reference implementation, Perl 6 is defined by its test suite. So there will eventually be other versions of Perl 6 that don't run on the Parrot VM.

Perl 5 is still evolving. Perl 5.10 was a major recent release, which (among many other improvements) also had a few Perl 6 related features. Perl 5.12 is under active development (as Perl 5.11). 

Perl 5.12 will have support for calling (and for being called by) Perl 6. Perl 6 should be able to compile the great majority of Perl 5 code -- this is a major priority.

Please see the Official Perl 5 Wiki to find the latest information:

<http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?perl_5_wiki>
It'll be out by Christmas. ;-) I've heard on podcasts that there there will be some kind of alpha before this Christmas. They were explicit about that but it has been a while since I heard that.