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Comment by alexandros | Hacker News Reader

Surface is a legitimate verb, just like any other. Perhaps the author isn't native, and is using a different verb than the one you'd like. Or perhaps that's how he feels like expressing himself. But it is shocking you'd think this is a worthwhile comment and others would upvote you on it.

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.

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On the second half of your post:

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.)

Thank you for clarifying what to "surface" an object means. I'd never heard that before.

It wasn't the top comment. 1 point. You just got lucky.

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...

To 'surface' something (in this context) means something like "to expose", or "to bring to attention". It's related to the more literal meaning of the verb, which is roughly "to come up to the surface of the water (or other medium)", as in "the submarine surfaced after a week long dive". He's just using it to describe exposing objects and functions in Objective-C to the JavaScript context.

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