I think it will be difficult for you to find something very similar to PHP, which is great for GUI applications. Languages like PHP show their legacy script-behind-a-webpage in such a way that awk and perl are very suitable for general-purpose / admin scripts in unix blocks.
There are GUI bindings (tk, gtk, ...) for many languages - "interpreted" ones are included that are closest (but still not so close) to php. The obvious examples would be python, ruby, or perl (although I would highly recommend one of the first two).
However, none of them are really oriented towards PC GUI applications, and it shows. Languages such as Java are much more suitable for these kinds of things, but they are a pretty significant step in choosing a language.
If you are running Windows, I would recommend C # with mono. I think it’s more important to use the right tool than for something close to PHP.
Don't even consider VB
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