Earlier quoted context omitted.
Associative data structures (maps / dicts) are super first-class in Clojure, in a way that they aren't in other Lisp-1's (at least from what I remember of dabbling in Racket). There's a literal syntax for them. Keywords are functions that you can call with a map as an argument. You can destructure them in `let` bindings. And so on. In my opinion, this turns out to be a pretty major win. Code is still data, it's just…
> Associative data structures (maps / dicts) are super first-class in Clojure “First-class”, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. See here for the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen . tl;dr: First-class-ness is about semantics, not syntax. And, while every language (including Racket) is broken in some ways, it's not broken enough for associative data struc…
> Why does this matter in a language with macros anyway
If you don't have this, you end up with a bunch of read table syntaxes for the same thing. These usually don't play nicely together. See Common Lisp libraries (since CL doesn't provide this syntax in the standard) for all the subtly incompatible hash table read syntaxes and printer implementations you can stomach.