Thanks to readr&#x27;s stringsAsFactors=F default, I&#x27;ve fortunately been avoiding unexpected issues due to factoring.<p>However, the default R functions still load data as factors and I have bad memories of that catching me by surprise, particularly when performing mathematical operations on vectors which are secretly factors and silently getting wrong results.<p>I still need to use factors with ggplot2 though for discrete orders. (E.g bar chart sorting)