Piers Cawley is one of the programmers I always listen to. He read Christopher Alexander to learn about actual architecture, for goodness sake. When people such as Piers started using Ruby seriously, I paid attention. Now when he says Ruby for now until Perl 6 comes out, you should pay attention too. (Fly on, Cardinal!)
"people like HIM". "Like" is used here as a preposition, which is always followed by pronouns in the objective case. Revisit your English grammar books, please.