Actually, due to excessive retardation of the brain, 'y' is considered a consonant in the English language. And if you insist to a native English speaker that y is clearly a vocal sound, they will simply refuse to believe it, and make up some imaginary rule as to why it's clearly a consonant. Discussions can take hours, do not engage.

Correct. The task says the challenge is to print a diamond. The challenge is actually to return a diamond. The problem is that I would have tried both if the description didn't insist that print is the correct one.

"The shape that will be returned from print method resembles a diamond..."

I see now that there is a misunderstanding, and that the description technically speaking isn't completely wrong, but you'd have to be very lucky to decipher the description(well, to first assume there is something fishy you would have to be extremely cynical).

It told you to print a diamond with a certain absolute width. Something cannot be (-x) units wide in absolute terms. Therefore you cannot accept the request for a negative width. You might as well ask why it doesn't specify not to accept a dictionary of the word "yo" repeated. It's simply outside of the logical validity of the task.
Sorry for being crude, but expecting to be explicitly told not to do things that are clearly inappliccable is just picky. You won't be led by the hand in real programming. In fact I think these tasks are a bit stupid at times, with how they remind you to not accept empty strings for algorithms that can only apply to ones that are not. If you do programming, knowing what kind of variable to accept is the very basics.

That being said, I'm no expert. People have different backgrounds and contexts for reacting to different things. But not being told every minor detail is just something I think everyone should get used to. The entire point of programming is to invent.

well, I'd like to see you print a negative asterisk. Or eat a negative apple.

I think it's self-evident that you don't accept negative input. (or input below 2, for that matter)

The task asks you specifically to print the diamond, but the tests only accept return.
I spent hours trying to find what I did wrong before realizing that the author of the kata simply just lied.
That's not acceptable. Boo.

The problem is that it asks for the function to print the diamond. Guess what, it only accepts return. You're not supposed to have the word print in the whole damn thing. So I wasted hours on trying to debug when the only problem was that it doesn't give you the correct information.