Microcontroller Programming Alternatives

I have been an embedded programming newbie for many, many years. I don't do enough of it to gain any on the learning curve. The products I am developing do not require extensive or complicated use of the 8-bit controllers I employ (mostly Freescale). I am currently using a version of Codewarrior and struggling with learning C. Years ago I learned the basics of LabView programming and recall how easy and fast it was to develop an application. I am wondering if there are any options for doing embedded programming this way, or at least in some "canned" or modular fashion

Thanks,
Dan

This could have started a flame war, so many options out there, and no reply!
Well, here's my pennies worth.
Stick with C if you prefer freescale, and go to a community college or do an online course to learn the syntax. The exercises will seem a waste of time from the point of view of embedded programming, so come up with a project and code that as you learn.
Otherwise change your processor to PIC or AVR, and continue in C, but with some easier to use C programming languages with good libraries, which set up and allow the use of all the on chip hardware, and have plenty of community support. A GCC based compiler is the obvious choice if you want free software. Setting up a tool chain can be a pain though, particularly if you don't do much programming.
If you like the AVR, use BASIC, Microelectronika or BASCOM both work, and have extensive libraries, and the syntax is a little friendlier than C.
Have a look at http://www.matrixtsl.com/flowcode/, dont know anything about it, it is a symbolic language, runs on PIC, AVR, and ARM. It is not cheap, but then again, neither is the NI package