The story is called Limes Inferior.

... can you build a Beowulf cluster of those?

As for IDE I was somewhat successful with IntelliJ Idea and its Lua plugin which seems to be mature enough. You can supply your own autocompletion scripts and docs as well.
There's also Lua plugin for Eclipse but that was not versatile enough for my purposes.

Yes, I also quit Slashdot like twice a day.