To talk about exactly the problem let's go ahead and pull up the documentation for date by Googling mdn date, this is going to bring us to the Mozilla Developer Network documentation page for Date, which is a really great set of documentation:

On this page, we have access to all of the methods available, these are all methods kind of like getTime that return something specific about the date:

For example, as shown in the previous screenshot, we have a getDate method that returns the day of the month, a value from 1 to 31. We have something like getMinutes, which returns the current minutes for the timestamp. All of these exist inside of Date.

Now the problem is that these are really unflexible. For example, inside Atom we have this little date, Jan 1st 1970 00:00:10 am. It's a shorthand version for January. Now we can get the actual month to show you how we'll create a variable called date. We'll go ahead and create new Date and then we're going to go ahead and call a method. I'm going to use console.log to print the value to the screen, and we're going to call date.getMonth:

// Jan 1st 1970 00:00:10 am

var date = new Date();
console.log(date.getMonth());

The getMonth method, as defined over inside of the documentation, is going to return a 0-based month value from 0 to 11, where 0 is January and 11 is December. Over inside the Terminal, I'm going to kick off our app using nodemon, since we're going to be restarting it quite a bit. Nodemon is in the playground folder not the server folder, and the file itself is called time.js:

nodemon playground/time.js

Once it's up and running we see we get 2 back which is expected:

It's currently March 25th 2018 and a 0 index value for March would be 2, even though you commonly think of it as 3.

Now the previous result is fine. We have the number 2 to represent the month, but getting an actual string Jan or January is going to be much more difficult. There is no built-in way to get this value. This means if you do want to get that value you're going to have to create an array, maybe you call the array months, and you store all of the values like this:

var date = new Date();
var months = ['Jan', 'Feb']
console.log(date.getMonth());

This is going to be fine and it might not seem like that big of a deal for month, but things get just as confusing for the day of the month, like the 1st we have. All we can really get back is the number 1. Actually formatting it to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd is going to be much more difficult. There just are not a good set of methods for formatting your date.

Things get even more complex when you want to have a relative time string, something like three minutes ago. It would be nice to print that inside the web app alongside the message, printing the actual month, the day and the year is not particularly useful. It would be cool if we could say hey this message was sent three hours ago, three minutes ago, or three years ago like a lot of chat applications do.