"send" and "recv" for sockets are a Berkeleyism from BSD, where networking was an add-on alongside the existing UNIX kernel. The distinction is historical, not functional. "select" works on both file-like objects and socket-like objects on Linux. Under QNX, "write" and "read" work on sockets, and "send" and "recv" are just alternate functions for "write" and "read".

Whether Python should hide that distinction is not clear, but it could.