I'm currently toying with the idea of embarking on a project that far exceeds my current programming ability in a language I have very little real world experience in (C). Would it be valuable to prototype in a higher level language that I'm more familiar with (like Perl/Python/Ruby/C#) just so I can get the overall design going?

Ultimately, the final product is performance sensitive, hence the choice of C, but I'm afraid not knowing C well will make me lose the forest for the trees.

While searching for similar questions, I noticed one fellow mention that programmers used to prototype in Prolog, then crank it out in assembler.