Nothing precludes a similar approach in Python:

    def backoff(wait=5, exponent=1.5):
        while True:
            yield
            sleep(wait)
            wait = wait ** exponent

    for backoff():
        connect_to_a_thing()

Here's the question: do you need exponential backoff in more than one place? Because if you don't, bundling all of that doesn't buy you anything and the original works just fine.

> This is trivially composable with any other control flow you might want to write in Ruby.

And it is actually trivially composable with other Python control flow, it's just a backoff iterator, you can drive it however you want, or compose it with other iterators (e.g. enumerate() to know which instance you're on, islice to stop after a certain number of tries, …)