Last week I published 10 reasons why C# is alive and kicking in 2018. It got picked up by the .net and C# community and some passionate developers like you responded by sending me their own reasons why they think C# is alive and kicking in 2018. So here’s another list of 7 community driven reasons why C# is smart bet in 2018 and beyond.

1. You can develop games with Unity

According to Unity Technologies 34% of top mobile games released in 2017 were built with Unity. 34% is a big share. Unity supports a couple of languages but C# takes center stage with over 80% over Unity games written in C#.

With gaming being a $108bn industry in 2017 and Unity being a major force within gaming, C# has another attack vector that will help it thrive in the foreseeable future.

2. You can develop AR and VR apps with Unity

Unity is not only used for creating recreational games. It’s also used for building educational, medical and engineering apps that require some form of augmented or virtual reality.

Augmented reality apps are estimated to be used by over 1bn people by 2020. This is good news for C#.

3. You can develop games with Godot

Another honorable mention is Godot, a popular open-source game engine. Godot has C# support since 2017.

4. Mads Torgersen

The initial version of this list mentioned Anders Hejlsberg as the current lead on the C# team at Microsoft. As some have rightly pointed out, it’s not Anders who pushes C# forward at the moment, but Mads Torgersen. Mads is now program manager for C#. With a doctorate in philosophy and computer science, C# is in good hands.

5. Companies have invested in C# and need your help

Some have pointed out that business around the world have made long-term investments in .net technology and C#. These companies are not going to change stack on a whim and they need C# developers to maintain their systems and continue their development.

6. You can use C# in Cake build scripts

Cake is a cross-platform build automation system. It’s built on top of the Roslyn compiler which enables you to write your build scripts in C#.

7. C# is a better version of Java

I’ll admit, we’re entering the realm of tribal warfare. This is probably a biased statement given C# developers where the main audience of the inital verion of this list. But still, some readers pointed out more than once that C# is considerd to be better version of Java.

Why? The var keyword, LINQ, extension methods, better null conditions, async/await and using blocks, for example. All this can be done in Java but it’s said to be more of a headache.

How does this help you?

From web to mobile apps, and from games to build scripts, C# is (almost) everywhere these days and it’s supported by a powerful company which employs some of the brightest people. Are you on the fence about C# or worried that it’s “dying”? Don’t be. Its future is bright.