Ideally, the language would protect you by putting the protected things inside the Mutex, so that it’s not possible to accidentally use them without going through the Mutex:

struct {
	...

	rateMu sync.Mutex<RateLimits>
}

type RateLimits struct {
	rateLimits [categories]Rate
	mostRecent rateLimitCategory
}

But yeah, if that’s going to be enforced by developers being careful instead, make it as clear as possible with explicit comments. As casperin said, better to also write doc comments on the protected fields so that they show up in autocomplete!

I was completely surprised that the comment included the second field. It doesn’t even share the name. I would put a doc comment (does Go have those?) on both the protected fields so they at least show up in the editor when you auto complete.

In addition, lots of Go developers use tools like betteralign that makes the whole argument moot because they rearrange stuct fields for performance.

I’ve worked for a few companies in Germany now, about half of them with their operating language being in German. All of them had comments being written exclusively in English. I don’t know how that is in other countries, but I get the impression from Europeans that this is pretty standard.

That said, my own preference is for American English for code (i.e. variable names, class names, etc), but British English for comments, commit messages, pull requests, etc. That’s because the names are part of the shared codebase and therefore standardised, but the comments and commit messages are specifically from me. As long as everyone can understand my British English, then I don’t think there’s much of a problem.

EDIT: That said, most of these suggestions feel more on the pedantic end of the spectrum as far as advice goes, and I would take some of this with a pinch of salt. In particular, when style suggestions like “I tend to write xyz” become “do this”, then I start to raise eyebrows at the usefulness of a particular style guide.

If someone wants to force everyone to spell something the same within a language they should make sure it’s spelled wrong in all varieties, like with HTTP’s ‘referer’.

The Go core developers feel so strongly about their speling that they’re wiling to change the names of constants from other APIs.

The gRPC protocol contains a status code enum (https://grpc.io/docs/guides/status-codes/), one of which is CANCELLED. Every gRPC library uses that spelling except for go-grpc, which spells it Canceled.

Idiosyncratic positions and an absolute refusal to concede to common practice is part and parcel of working with certain kinds of people.

You wouldn’t demand an Arabic developer to write all his comments in English for your sake for the sake of being idiomatic, would you?

If this is something other than a private pet project of a person who has no ambition of ever working with people outside of his country? Yes, yes I would.

I believe the advice is still applicable to non-native speakers. In all companies I worked for in France, developers write code in English, including comments, sometimes even internal docs. There are a lot of inconsistencies (typically mixing US English and GB English, sometimes in the same sentence.)

of certain words

“If you use standard terms, spell them in a standard way” is not the same as “use only one language ever”.

I had to solve this once. I maintain a library that converts between HTML/CSS color formats, and one of the formats is a name (and optional spec to say which set of names to draw from). HTML4, CSS2, and CSS2 only had “gray”, but CSS3 added “grey” as another spelling for the same color value, and also added a bunch of other new color names which each have a “gray” and a “grey” variant.

Which raises the question: if I give the library a hex code for one of these and ask it to convert to name, which name should it convert to?

The solution I went with was to always return the “gray” variant since that was the “original” spelling in earlier HTML and CSS specs:

https://webcolors.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html#why-does-webcolors-prefer-american-spellings

I thought you guys loved imperialism?

I don’t think it’s really “imperialism”—firstly, “marshaling” isn’t even the preferred spelling in the US. Secondly in countries all over the world job listings stipulate English language skills all the time (even Arabic candidates) and the practice is widely accepted because facilitating communication is generally considered to be important. Lastly, while empires certainly have pushed language standardization as a means to stamp out identities, I don’t think it follows that all language standards exist to stamp out identities (particularly when they are optional, as in the case of this post).

What are the concerns of the first group? You have only characterized them by what they don’t care about: “arbitrary formatting rules”.