IELM (M-x ielm) derives from comint-mode and provides a convenient interactive environment for evaluating lisp expressions. Some of the conveniences such as automatically evaluating expressions can make iterative development easier.
Currently, ob-emacs-lisp does not support sessions. It would be nice if support of sessions was added to ob-emacs-lisp such that the session buffer is an ielm-mode buffer. -- Suhail