Why C#?
When it comes to Unity scripting, an early question when making a new game is which language to choose, because Unity offers a choice. The official choices are C# or JavaScript. However, there's a debate about whether JavaScript should more properly be named "JavaScript" or "UnityScript" due to the Unity-specific adaptations made to the language. This point is not our concern here. The question is which language should be chosen for your project. Now, it initially seems that as we have a choice, we can actually choose all two languages and write some script files in one language and other script files in another language, thus effectively mixing up the languages. This is, of course, technically possible. Unity won't stop you from doing this. However, it's a "bad" practice because it typically leads to confusion as well as compilation conflicts; it's like trying to calculate distances in miles and kilometers at the same time.
The recommended approach, instead, is to choose one of the three languages and apply it consistently across your project as the authoritative language. This is a slicker, more efficient workflow, but it means one language must be chosen at the expense of others. This book chooses C#. Why? First, it's not because C# is "better" than the others. There is no absolute "better" or "worse" in my view. Each and every language has its own merits and uses, and all the Unity languages are equally serviceable for making games. The main reason is that C# is, perhaps, the most widely used and supported Unity language, because it connects most readily to the existing knowledge that most developers already have when they approach Unity. Most Unity tutorials are written with C# in mind, as it has a strong presence in other fields of application development. C# is historically tied to the .NET framework, which is also used in Unity (known as Mono there), and C# most closely resembles C++, which generally has a strong presence in game development. Further, by learning C#, you're more likely to find that your skill set aligns with the current demand for Unity programmers in the contemporary games industry. Therefore, I've chosen C# to give this book the widest appeal and one that connects to the extensive body of external tutorials and literature. This allows you to more easily push your knowledge even further after reading this book.
