I make games for a living and repair PC's. While I wouldn't recommend a laptop (for GAMING and PRODUCTION) to anyone due to the parts not being designed for use in heavy production or rendering (including games) unless it's a high price point with parts really made for wear and tear, I would urge you to think about what each component in the machine does. Heat is the enemy and each part will fail in a machine over time one by one. With laptops you can't just go opening up easily and replacing a CPU fan, or upgrading that fan, or changing to a cooler case- laptops cook eggs at their single little exhaust vent. At 550 you probably wont get a good graphics card with drivers that update regularly. (Like Nvidia.)
Edit: And by thinking of the parts, laptops cram them all together or integrate them. There is no space to cool and you can't upgrade your cooling system if your build isn't quite right. You can't adjust your power supply's voltage if you make upgrades as well. They were designed for convenience tasks and on the go activities. Not sitting ones.
You will get a lot of disappointment if you try to run 3D games (especially high end or unoptimized ones) on a cheap laptop, and for the price you can definitely get better quality and years via desktop. (Putting it together yourself can save a lot of money, there are sites you can look up premade builds and buy each part at the lowest price.) Laptops are grade A for college and work documentation, looking at graphs and managing money. The gaming laptops that run will not last as long and it is possible to suddenly fry them if you push it beyond its means. For example you could run Skyrim, right? But then you mod it and overheat it 'too' much once and it never runs the same again. Nearly unfixable.
For programming, have you tried to run Visual Studio lately? Lol what is up with that? Why is it so big and slow loading these days? But yeah for mostly text work it's fine.