It reminds me of a Java programmer I used to work with who constantly said he was "hydrating" his objects. I kept wanting to tell him he wasn't sounding as cool as he thought he was.
It's quite sad that this comment is currently the top comment, in an article that raises quite an important topic for the JS and iOS developer communities. As much as I loathe the "hn is turning into reddit" crowd, this is much worse. HN is turning into a criticism machine that when it can't find anything worthwhile to criticise, will literally criticise anything at all rather than elevate a positive comment to the top.
I feel like this happens when people find the basic idea of the article (JS is now a first-class language on iOS!) interesting enough to upvote, but the article itself isn't anything exciting beyond that. The top comments are people's reaction to the articles. Right now, they're "the article keeps calling Obj-C proprietary, but it's totes not"; "that's cool and all, and here's some history, but how is this better than Obj-C"; and "here's a talk about it on youtube".
If there's more interesting conversation to be had, someone would have submitted it. You could have submitted it! I read through every other top-level comment, and didn't find any of them were particularly interesting. Is there some conversation that you think is worth having?
(But yeah, surface is a totally legit verb, makes sense in this context (bringing an Obj-C object into JS), and it was only used twice anyway.)
And I wasn't criticizing. At least that wasn't my intention. Though now I'm amused that you lament HN turning into a criticism machine by criticizing my inadvertent criticism ;)
I was just trying to understand what the author meant by "to surface" an object. Still wondering...