`'` or `transpose` failing on strings is not beginner-friendly

Internals & Design Internals
1

While I understand that transpose is recursive, the fact that it fails on strings (together with the beautiful ' notation) is a problem for beginners.
I would vote for a less pure solution that stops the recursion for AbstractString and just work (or maybe better make the recursion of transpose optional in Julia 2.0) rather than the current arcane error message it gives.

My two cents as the idiot user :-/

EDIT: I now also understand the difference between “linear algebra” and “container-like” operations… still I think that this is an example of stuff that make the Julia language learning curve steeper than what should be…

2

I don’t think we should change the current behavior, but I think we could do a better job at giving a more helpful error message that points the user to permutedims and PermutedDimsArray.

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3

I think, maybe, the best solution is just to raise people awareness of permutedims (always use it when possible in examples) and give a better error message as @simeonschaub pointed out.

The documentation of transpose already recognizes this is a common mistake and points to permutedims.

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