John was working on implementing negative right arguments to ⎕DL (the delay function in all APL implementations). As soon as that is sorted, we expect him to reappear.

John once did a live demo where a negative number (like ¯17.01) suddenly appeared in his APL session log. He looked puzzled for a moment, continued with his demo script for a little while, and arrived at the statement ⎕DL ¯17 (delay negative 17 seconds, and return the actual amount of time waited). He exclaimed "Oh, THAT's what that was!" and continued with his demo.

John had a fantastic sense of humour, if you have not seen them I recommend taking a little time off to watch some of the recordings at https://johnscholes.rip/video/

Sadly, John Scholes passed away in 2019. https://aplwiki.com/wiki/John_Scholes