I'm not sure this was terribly uncommon at the time. My work for a thesis was prototyped in Scheme and then ported to C once I was sure I had all the kinks work

I'm not sure this was terribly uncommon at the time. My work for a thesis was prototyped in Scheme and then ported to C once I was sure I had all the kinks worked out. And I know I wasn't the only one who did that. I found it to be a much more efficient way to work iteratively, because software that's written in a lisp is fundamentally more amenable to change than software that's written in a language like C. Today, not so much, because the gap has closed a lot. IDEs and improvements to the ergonomics of lower level languages have made them a lot more convenient to work in end-to end, and cheap memory and compiler improvements have made it a lot more feasible to just ship code that was written in a higher level language.