Using Enumoji's we don't have to use conditional expressions for the 3 data types needed for two states Alive|Dead in this port. We can then use the F# operators string, int, and enum to convert to what we need.

We can infer types on our statically scoped variables!

F# requires you to qualify any variable you want to mutate. You save so much boiler plate with type inference, adding this extra 6 let word hardly seems like a thing, and makes it easier to reason about variables. Notice we only have to use the keyword 3 times in this program ported directly from C#.

Although there is a recursive modifier (rec) that can be applied to a module or namespace, typically you declare your functions before you use them in F#. So nextGeneration helper function was moved to the top of the file in this port.

Although you can do C# style static classes in F# with some boilerplate. A module is the preferred vehicle for static functions. CLI wise it will look like a static class in C#.

In F# the last line in an expression is the returned value. No return keyword necessary, but that also means no easy short circuiting.

The pipe operator |> makes it easy to describe data flowing from one function to another. Otherwise it would have been written with nested parentheses:

ignore(sb.Append(string(future.[row, column])))

The string operator calls ToString() on an object. And the ignore operator is how you discard return values that you are not going to use (Like Append returns a reference to the string builder it's mutating. You'll get a warning if you have an expression that returns a value that isn't unit and it's not the last line of it's enclosing expression.

F# array creation functions let you pass a lambda function to be used in initialization. Lambda's are prefixed with fun in F#, it's fun! Since we are randomly filling out the array, I discard the row and column arguments in the lambda. We can use the enum operator which is actually able to infer the enum type statically in this case!!

I think I read somewhere that C# designers wished they never special cased += and -= operators to be AddHandlerand RemoveHandler methods. So those methods are what you can use in F# instead of the operators. To make things simpler without explicitly creating delegates, you can use the Add method with a lambda, as long as you don't need to remove the handler later.

Main function is expected to return an integer. So last line is a zero.