For the longest time, developers have taken Chrome OS machines and run tools like Crouton to turn them into Linux-based developer machines. That was a bit of a hassle, but it worked. But things are…
While this is pretty exciting, it still seems like Crouton would be needed to be able to really work on ChromeOS as a full development environment. For example, unless you used a browser-based dev environment, like AWS Cloud9 or shelled into a remote server, you’d probably still want to set up an environment on your local filesystem – which means installing software such as Node, PHP, Ruby, (whatever you work on these days).
Update: It’s worth noting that, while not having tested it out myself, it sounds like these Electron-based applications aren’t super performant on ChromeOS – at least not until they get GPU support.
None the less, it’s still pretty cool to see how Chromebooks are evolving!