To address your main question: no.
Now to address the rest of what you say:
What's your budget for a ThinkPad? Why do you want a ThinkPad in particular? Saying an i5 processor is meaningless. What model? Like i5-10210U. That seems like a really big SSD for a laptop that would be of the era to still only have two cores and 8 gigs of RAM. Yes that could be enough power for beginner to intermediate programming.
Additional processor cores can't be emulated on storage. The only reason storage could be used as swap is because there is no difference between storage and RAM except one is volatile and the other one isn't. A processor isn't storage although it has storage on it in registers and cache.
You're getting way ahead of yourself with the third paragraph there and I suggest that you go and relearn the fundamentals of how computers work before you even approach any of this next stuff.