My parents got a computer when I was 8. My dad had a rule that I could only use the computer for an hour a day, unless I was programming. Because of that, I got a lot of books from the library and played with BASIC and Pascal. I tried to learn C at that point also, but it was too complicated for me.
As for LabVIEW, I started with the
Learn LabVIEW in 6 hours online course. From there I started doing
Project Euler problems using LabVIEW. Since then, everything I've done is FIRST related, first implementing our 2008 code on the cRIO with LabVIEW, and now the 2009 and 2010 robots. Helping teams at regionals is a great way to get exposed to a lot more stuff.