Perl was everywhere; that was its heyday.
PHP was not yet a joke. Or, rather, it was a joke, but a chuckler rather than the groaner it has become.
In 1999, if you said you were a software developer, that meant you wrote programs for people to use on their computers. If you wrote software that ran on servers, that was sort of unusual, so you would describe yourself as a "server-side developer" or something of that sort.
If all you did was make web pages, well, that was basically just gluing HTML tags together, so you were at best a "web designer". Maybe, just maybe, you could rise up to a sort of limited honorary "developer" status if your work involved a lot of heavy-duty CGI coding. Nobody would have called your tools a "dev environment" back then.
